Dragon Prince 03 - Sunrunner's Fire Read Online Free

everywhere was touched. Through the weaving it was announced that a new Lord of Goddess Keep had been accepted, having demonstrated his worthiness to wear the ten rings. Ostvel ought to have realized that of all faradhi -gifted people, Andry would have singled out Alasen in particular for his touch.
    “I should have known,” he told her now. “He loves you. And it’s the only way he can touch you.”
    “Sioned must tell him never to do it again.” She raked her hair back from her brow and sat up. “Ostvel, I don’t want him intruding in our lives!”
    Ostvel spoke very softly. “He’ll always love you, my dear. And I know that you’ll always love him—just as you know I’ll always love Cami.” He took both her hands in his. “Both of us must undertake not to be jealous.”
    “I Chose you, not him. He’ll have to accept that.”
    Ostvel pressed a kiss into the warm hollow of each palm, and smiled.
     
     
    Sioned did not tell Rohan about the words exchanged on starlight. She told no one but Urival. And he promised that as soon as he could, he would come to Stronghold—with a translated copy of the Star Scroll.

Chapter Two
    721: Castle Crag
    O n taking possession of Castle Crag in the spring of 720, Ostvel had set about several formidable tasks—the most immediate of which was to learn his way around the labyrinthine keep.
    After spending much of his youth at Goddess Keep, an imposing and logical structure, he had become chief steward of Stronghold, a castle built for defense with a correspondingly efficient design. Skybowl, his holding for fourteen winters, was a small place without need or opportunity for eccentricities. But his new home was something else again.
    Cut into the side of cliffs above the Faolain River and built out from those cliffs in cantilevered overhangs, Castle Crag was a maze of rooms, halls, suites, staircases, and the most exquisite oratory in all thirteen princedoms. Ostvel had taken his first tour of the place guided by a small battalion of functionaries, all eager to point out the wonders of his or her own domain within the keep. Their chatter had prevented him from gaining any reliable knowledge of where he was, let alone where he was being led.
    That night he had frowned over his problem, knowing that the next day would show him as ignorant of the castle’s environs as he had been at the moment he’d arrived. The servants, he knew, would be watching for mistakes; that afternoon Alasen had lost her way after what she suspected was purposeful misdirection on the part of a page. At midnight therefore he had enlisted her and their Sunrunner, an old friend of his named Donato, in a secret expedition through the twisting corridors. Each of them chose an essential location. Armed with a collection of trinkets—bronze, gold, silver, copper, blue ceramic—privately color-coded to each destination, they spent the rest of the night seeking out the best routes and at all important junctures left behind a vase, a candlestick, a figurine, a dish on convenient tables and shelves.
    “Copper to the kitchens,” Alasen had recited as they finally fell into bed, exhausted but well-pleased with their trick. “Gold to your library, silver to mine, bronze to the great hall, blue to the gardens. But, Ostvel, what if somebody moves everything tomorrow morning?”
    “You forget, my princess, that when you began rearranging our suite you ordered that anything we changed or added be touched only to clean it.”
    “Did I?” She chuckled. “That was clever of me.”
    The next morning all their signposts were still in position. With supreme confidence they strode through their new home. The servants were astounded. Donato even waited three whole days before rearranging the entire system. But the joke had been on the Sunrunner; he was the one who had forgotten the direct route to the back gardens.
    Now, a year and a half later, Ostvel rarely needed a glance at the trinkets to remind him where he was.