HM02 House of Moons Read Online Free Page B

halted in midstep in spite of herself and turned. He wore his golden hair long and undisciplined, and his dark-flecked eyes hinted at things best not mentioned in the daylight. She shivered. Was he broadcasting at her? Strengthening her shields, she swallowed hard and looked away. “How could I possibly help?”
    He reached her side again, his expression strangely hungry. “By using what the Old People taught you to travel between times.”
    She paled. She had been forced to go over this subject again and again with her father and various other Lords. They would never really understand what the ilseri, the natives of this world, had taught her all those years ago. In fact, most of them did not even want to understand, persisting in the mistaken belief that the temporal pathways could be put to some sort of purpose, like a hammer or an awl or any other tool—but the truth was that they could not.
    “You could go back and see who attacked.” Chee’s angular face smiled blandly at her, but she noticed how his eyes, gone as reflective as two pools of melted gold, showed no emotion at all.
    “It’s not that simple.” Her heart thumped inside her chest. Not now, she told herself. She couldn’t handle this on top of everything else.
    “Couldn’t you go back?” he insisted.
    “If I could find it.” She saw the glittering blue temporal pathways again in her mind, the bewildering array of Whens to which one could travel if one had sufficient Talent and training—and if one were female. “The timelines exist in infinite number, but most of them are Otherwhens as far as we are concerned. The ilseri can tell the difference between Otherwhen and Truewhen, but I have always found it difficult.”
    “Fascinating.” He moved forward beside her, his steps measured and thoughtful. “I would like to learn more.”
    She caught her breath; there was a strangeness about him that set her teeth on edge, and nasty rumors circulated about the House of Chee, talk of instability, madness—and murder. Coals smoldered behind this man’s eyes whenever he looked at her. “Some other time, perhaps, Lord Chee.”
    “Yes.” He smiled again without warmth. “Perhaps later would be better.”
    Three people ahead of her, a middle-aged man escorted his wife onto a covered platform inset above and below and at the four midpoints with pale-blue ilsera crystals. A second later, they disappeared as he mentally wrenched the energies to transport them home. Then a tall, elegant woman stepped into place—one of the Sennays, if Haemas wasn’t mistaken, and a distant cousin of hers.
    A young woman in front of Haemas, gowned in Rald crimson, stepped into the portal, holding a little girl dressed in lacy blue by the hand. How strange to take a child to a Council meeting, Haemas thought. Her father had never taken her anywhere, not even to a Council meeting, even though they were always held here at Tal’ayn. She had rarely left the grounds until the day she fled down into the Lowlands—when Jarid had convinced her that she’d killed her father.
    “You must visit Chee’ayn,” Chee said pleasantly over her shoulder. “We have the only surviving stand of pine there, right at the edge of a cliff. Chee’ayn is the one place in the Highlands where the soil is just right. When the wind blows from the north, you can smell the needles all the way up to the main house.”
    Haemas stepped onto the platform as soon as the woman and child disappeared, hastily throwing her mind open to the vibrations of the psi-active crystals. North ... south, she recited in her mind, feeling each crystal warm in turn, east ... west ... above ... below! She altered the vibrations to match the portal at Shael’donn. The world twisted into a chill grayness, then resolved itself into the familiar snow-covered grounds shared by the paired schools.
    * * *
    Kevisson stepped out of the Lenhe’ayn portal into the warmer air of the Lowlands. Smoke from the smoldering fields