Nightrunners 03 - Traitor's Moon Read Online Free Page B

he looked, but there was hard muscle under the homespun.
    "Yslanti bek kir!" he exclaimed happily. "Kratis nolieus i 'mrai? "
    "You speak better Aurenfaie now than I do, Almost-Brother," she laughed. "I didn't understand a word of that after the greeting."
    Alec stepped back, grinning at her. "Sorry. We've spoken almost nothing else all winter."
    The beaten look he'd had back in Plenimar was gone; looking into those dark blue eyes, she read the signs of something her father had hinted at in his letter. She'd asked Alec once if he was in love with Seregil, and he'd been shocked by such a notion. It seemed the boy had finally figured things out. Somewhere in the back of her mind a tiny twinge of regret stirred, and she squelched it mercilessly.
    Releasing her, Alec clasped hands with Micum, then cast a questioning look at the uniformed riders. "What's all this?"
    "I have a message for Seregil," she told him.
    "Must be quite a message!"
    It is, she thought. One he's been waiting for since before I was born. "That's going to take some explaining. Where is he?"
    "Hunting up on the ridge. He should be back by sunset."
    "We'd better go find him. Time's running short."
    Alec gave her a thoughtful look but didn't press. "I'll get my horse."
    Mounted bareback on Patch, he led them up to the high ground above the meadow.
    Beka found herself studying him again as they rode. "Even with your 'faie blood, I thought you'd be more changed," she said at last. "Do I look much different to you?"
    "Yes," he replied with a hint of the same sadness she'd sensed in her father when they'd met at Two Gulls.
    "What have you two been doing since I saw you last?"
    Alec shrugged. "Wandered for a while. I thought we'd head for the war, offer our services to the queen, but for a long time he just wanted to get as far from Skala as possible. We found work along the way, singing, spying—" He tipped her a rakish wink. "Thieving a bit when things got thin. We ran into some trouble last summer and ended up back here."
    "Will you ever go back to Rhiminee?" she asked, then wished she hadn't.
    "I'd go," he said, and she caught a glimpse of that haunted look as he looked away. "But Seregil won't even talk about it. He still has nightmares about the Cockerel. So do I, but his are worse."
    Beka hadn't witnessed the slaughter of the old innkeeper and her family, but she'd heard enough to turn her stomach. Beka had known Thryis since she was a child herself, playing barefoot in the garden with the granddaughter, Cilia. Cilia's father had taught her how to carve whistles from spring hazel branches.
    These innocents had been among the first victims the night Duke Mardus and his men attacked the Oreska House. The attack at the Cockerel had been unnecessary, a vindictive blow struck by Mardus's necromancer, Vargul Ashnazai. He'd killed the family, captured Alec, and left the cruelly mutilated bodies for Seregil to find. In his grief, Seregil had set the place ablaze as a funeral pyre.
    At the top of the ridge Alec reined in and whistled shrilly through his teeth. An answering call came from off to their left, and they followed it to a pond.
    "It reminds me of the one below Watermead," she said.
    "It does, doesn't it?" said Alec, smiling again. "We even have otters."
    None of them saw Seregil until he stood up and waved. He'd been sitting on a log near the water's edge and his drab tunic and trousers blended with the colors around him.
    "Micum? And Beka!" Feathers fluttered in all directions as he strode over to them, still clutching the wild goose he'd been plucking.
    He was thin and weathered, too, but every bit as handsome as Beka remembered—perhaps more so, now that she saw him through a woman's eyes instead of a girl's. Though slender and not overly tall, he carried himself with a swordsman's grace that lent unconscious stature. His fine-featured Aurenfaie face was sun-browned, his large grey eyes warm with the humor she'd known from childhood. For the first time,