The Undead King: The Saga of Jai Lin: Book One Read Free

“I need to finish this.”
    Brook and Leo watched as Crow laid one hand over the fawn’s eyes and with the other stuck a knife deep into its brain. The young deer spasmed, then went still. Crow muttered Elon’s prayer of thanks before putting the limp corpse over his shoulder. The siblings turned their backs on the clearing and headed back the way they came, northwards, towards the camp of the Black Wings.
    Leo set the pace, though Brook kept him within a close enough distance with their mind link. It was a skill she was still working hard to develop and had come a long way with since Leo was a tiny pup. It was almost to the point where she could actually put words to what Leo was thinking and not just feel the dog’s emotions, but her skills were far from perfect. It was how Leo had gotten away from her on what should have been a routine foraging trip. It had brought them a good ten or so eye-spans south of the Axe Man’s River, right into the heart of the Borderlands.
    “Make sure crazy doesn’t get too far ahead of us,” Crow said.
    “Don’t you worry your bucket-beak sized head, big brother. I have him.”
    “That’s what you said before, darling sister.”
    “That was different. He must have got the fear scent. I’m still trying to work out how to calm him when that happens.”
    “Do you think he sensed those roots?” Crow shifted the fawn to his other shoulder. Though it was well into autumn and the air was cool and crisp, Brook’s brother’s long dark hair was glistening with sweat. The long black capes and thick wool vestments worn by Black Wing men might as well have been clay ovens, in stark contrast to the cool cotton dresses the women wore under their cloaks. “Have you seen them before? In a dead dream perhaps?”
    Brook was what the Black Wings called a dead dreamer. While she was asleep, she could see the world as it was through the eyes of a person moments before they died and joined Elon in the Dusk. The ability was seen as both a blessing and a curse, for though the Black Wings could learn much of the old ways from them, the subject of the dead dreams often met with a violent death, usually from the teeth of a killim , the name the Black Wings gave to the undead that feasted on human flesh. Though she was never more than a mere observer and safe from the dangers the dreams contained, Brook would always wake from the dead dreams trembling under her furs, wide-eyed and out of breath, grasping for her journal to write of what she saw before the visions slipped away.
    “It’s very possible I’ve seen the roots in a dead dream before, though I can’t remember for sure. There is something about them that is very familiar, and Leo may very well have sensed them, as he does with things I’ve witnessed in dead dreams. I’ll have to consult my journals when we’re back at camp.”
    “Maybe Old Wren will know something about it.”
    “Yes, perhaps he will.” The siblings quieted their conversation, instead listening to the sounds of the land around them, on alert for anything that could pose a threat. The Borderlands were dangerous: besides roving bands of brigands, mercenaries and Karyatim wild men, there were also killim, the undead , if you were from the western cities. Not nearly as many as in the Blight to the south, but even one killim, its teeth gnashing for your throat, was more than enough.
    The dead never wandered north of the Axe Man, the poisoned river that ran between the Borderlands and the Green Lands, or hadn’t since the General Godwin’s war three decades before. They stuck to the plains in the south, to the Blight and the dead cities that lay beyond it.
    The trail they followed was an old one and not much used. It had been a road paved in black stone once, when man had driven carts made of steel that drank the black blood from the earth; now it was merely a clearing through the trees, the black stone broken to pebbles and covered by dirt and sod. After several hours of