Age of War (The Legends of the First Empire #3)

The crowd of sweat-slick men erupted into cheers and shouts of jubilation. Sebek hadn’t been beaten; the match wasn’t even close to a draw. Disarming Tesh counted as a victory, and the kid hadn’t mounted even a single offense in the whole match. But he had held his own, and for the men on that field, it was a victory beyond any of their dreams.

Sebek flipped Tesh’s lost sword into the air with his foot and struck it with a sharp swing from his own blade, sending the weapon spinning at the kid. Tesh caught it by its handle, and slammed both blades into their scabbards.

“Well done, Techylor,” Sebek said.

As if the contest had been the finale, training for that day ended when everyone rushed to clap Tesh on the back.

Raithe turned to Malcolm. “What’s it mean? What Sebek called Tesh?”

“Techylor?” Malcolm said. “It means swift of hand, or just swifthand, I suppose.”

“Great. The kid’s going to be impossible to live with now,” Raithe grumbled.

Malcolm nodded. “Probably, but you ought to consider yourself fortunate. Next to Nyphron, you’ve got the best Shield in Alon Rhist.”

Raithe frowned. “Apparently, I’m second best to Nyphron in a number of things.”





CHAPTER SEVEN


Dreams and Nightmares


I started writing to chase away demons and to preserve the loved ones I had lost. After all these years, none of that has changed.

—THE BOOK OF BRIN

The moist hand clamped over Brin’s mouth. The other one wrapped around her waist, trapping her arms. She was hauled away, her heels dragging across stone as the raow rasped in her ear, “Relax. Don’t struggle. I have you now. Just need to get you back to the pile.”

Back to the pile!

Brin couldn’t scream, couldn’t move; she could barely breathe. She tried to kick her feet, but that did nothing to save her. As disgusting as it might be, she tried to bite the hand, but her mouth couldn’t open.

The thing continued to whisper in a frighteningly reassuring tone, as if it were trying to save her. But it wasn’t speaking to her—not really. “Yes, everything will be okay. We have you now. Just need to get back, back to the pile. Need to get back so I can eat and finally sleep.”

She felt it lick her cheek.

“Such a sweet face.”



She woke up, her heart racing. Something covered her face, making it hard to breathe.

Brin reached up and found the pillow. Ripping it away, she threw it on the floor. “Stupid thing,” she whispered in the dark, shaking.

She propped herself on her elbows and took a few more breaths, calming down. The raow was long dead, and Brin was in a pretty little home on Lyonet Street, in Little Rhen. Moonlight entered the window, casting a skewed square across the floor, the wall, and over the feet of the two beds. Roan’s was empty again. Downstairs, Padera was snoring.

Brin’s nightshirt stuck to the sweat on her skin. She shivered, drawing the blanket around her.

Just a dream, she imagined her mother saying. Go back to sleep.

But Brin knew that if she tried, the raow would come again. It always did. Once the raow invaded her sleep, only daylight chased it off. She’d managed to go a whole week this time without a visit. But tonight…She leaned over the edge of the bed and pointed a finger at the fallen pillow. “I blame you.”

Brin wasn’t used to pillows, never had one before. The bag full of feathers collapsed under the weight of her head, folding in and doing its best to smother her. She sighed, frowned, and folded her arms. She wasn’t going back to sleep anytime soon. She’d be exhausted in the morning, but there was no getting around it. She was up.

She started to swing her feet off the side of the bed, but pulled them back at the last second. She spun around on her stomach and carefully lowered her head to peer under the bed. Then she looked under Roan’s. Nothing. Relief and embarrassment washed over her in equal parts. How old am I? She got up and fumbled in the dark, her hands searching for the leather satchel. She had made the carrying case herself. A single piece of goat hide was folded around her stack of parchments and bound up with straps. From the small night table, she grabbed up a handful of quills. Brin had been using reeds dipped in ink to mark on the pages but found the quills better. After employing hundreds of people to strip birds of their feathers for making arrows, Alon Rhist had piles of naked quills lying around. They, too, were hollow, and much more durable than reeds. Thanks to Moya, Brin had hundreds.



Brin carried the parchments, ink, and quills to the desk by the window and set them down. After a long winter, she had an impressive pile of vellum parchment. Part of the stack was a translation—as best she could manage—of the tablet rubbings they had saved from the Ancient One’s chamber in Neith. She was still working on those, but after translating the metallurgy portion for Roan, she had jumped ahead in order to record more recent events while things were still fresh in her mind.

Michael J. Sullivan's books