Pawn Of The Planewalker (Book 5) Read Online Free

apprentice, yet. I am not teaching him any magic.”
    Reynard shrugged. “Either way, the boy’s still a better shot than you’ll ever be.”
    Garrick rested his hand on the tip of his long bow.
    He wore a black jerkin that was slightly too large for him, and breeches tucked into boots that came to mid–calf. Sweat glistened from his brow and brought him a chill despite the unseasonable midday heat. A pair of guardsmen fought a practice bout at the edge of earshot, grim and silent during their skirmishes, but jesting loudly between. Garrick was fighting a headache due to a lack of sleep, and the effort he expended fighting the power inside him did nothing to help.
    “I came out here to get away from the meetings and the arguments,” Garrick said. “What did you come here for? As if I can’t guess?”
    Reynard and Garrick comprised Darien’s Council of Sorcery, ostensibly set to make policy for how magic would be developed and shared among members of the new Torean House. But Darien and Reynard were scuffling over every nuance of how the Freeborn should be run, both thinking their way was proper, and neither willing to give any space for nuance.
    “We need to discuss your friend,” Reynard said.
    “There is nothing to discuss.”
    “The man knows nothing about magic.”
    “Darien is doing what he thinks is best.”
    “He is shackling the Torean House.”
    Garrick glanced forlornly at the target, and pushed against the long bow, feeling its bend against his palm.
    “The mages voted unanimously,” Garrick said.
    “You should be ashamed of yourself, Garrick.” Reynard pointed his finger at him. “You in particular should understand how that vote was made in the heat of battle. And after Sunathri …”
    Garrick waited while Reynard collected himself.
    Memories came to him. Sunathri’s voice, soft yet firm, her eyes blazing with commitment, the touch of her hand as they joined in spell casting. Garrick, like all of the Freeborn, was here because of Sunathri’s vision, and because of the power of her beliefs. Yet her memory also made his hunger twist. It was a hunger he was learning to control, or at least to exist with, but it was still a blackness, dark and malignant, that still seeded his dreams with images of the two women he thought he had loved, both now dead because of him. And it was a hunger that was growing as restless as he was.
    “Sunathri is dead,” he said.
    “And if she wasn’t, then what Darien is doing to her order would surely accomplish the job.”
    “Do you think she would have wanted us to be bickering like this?”
    “Sunathri would do what it took to drive her vision.”
    “No,” Garrick’s reply was, perhaps, too sharp. “Sunathri would do what it took to keep the Freeborn together. There is a difference.”
    “If we use Darien’s plan, nothing will ever get developed.”
    “Darien’s structure is a tightly reined approach,” Garrick admitted.
    It was, in fact, a bureaucratic nightmare that he and Darien had argued over in private for each of the past three nights—an argument that contributed to his headache this morning and hence his jaunt to the practice range. The fact that Garrick had healed Darien’s father—to the extent possible, anyway—had not given Darien any mind to bend from his position. He believed the people of Dorfort needed to see the order as being constrained or they would never accept the Freeborn as a full partner in their midst.
    Reynard spoke in a firm voice.
    “The orders aren’t dead, Garrick. You’ve said so yourself. We have to be strong enough to defend ourselves when they decide to finish the job they started. This approach of development by committee that Darien wants to create will kill our progress.”
    Garrick sighed.
    Reynard wasn’t much older than he was. But where Garrick just wanted to find his own way in his new world, Reynard was full of vision, ready to tackle the entire plane. He pushed ideas before him as if they were cut