Return of the Guardian-King Read Online Free Page A

us out before ’em like dainties on a tray?” She turned to her husband. “He’s lost his mind, Oakes. Tell him. We need to take shelter on that ledge. Wait ’til daylight when they’ll have to seek the shadow.”
    “If we do that,” Abramm said calmly, “some of us will die. Maybe all of us. I believe Eidon has provided us this path, but it’s up to us to trust him.”
    “If it’s so safe,” Trinley asked him, “why aren’t the people in the monastery coming to help us? Why aren’t they at least telling us it’s safe?”
    “Maybe they don’t know that it is,” Abramm said.
    “But if they made it—’
    ’ “I don’t think they made it. I think the luima made it.”
    And that damped every further word for a long moment.
    “We saw no tracks leading away from it,” Abramm said. “And it’s too freshly broken for us not to have seen the men who did it heading back up to the monastery. Not to mention the question of why they’d come all the way out here to make it for us and then not wait for us to get to it. In fact, I believe I saw the men who did it, right before we left the trees. But they vanished before we got here.”
    He fell silent, bearing their incredulous and terrified scrutiny. No one had any answers for him.
    With the wolves’ howls approaching rapidly now, Abramm backed up the path a bit, then said, “You know I was right about the hut and the wolves. You know sometimes I can see things the rest of you don’t. For all those reasons you trusted me to lead you down here; I beg you to trust me on this, as well. If we don’t go now . . . it will only get harder.”
    He eyed the depths of the ravine again, still empty for the moment. . . . He turned his gaze to Rolland, standing on the far side of the bridge and staring back at him in horror. Of all the men here, Rolland was the one Abramm thought he had a chance of convincing first. But it would be hard. The man had three children and a wife, all of whom he’d be putting at risk if he went with Abramm’s suggestion. He could see the big man’s eyes drop to his wife, who had turned back to face him when she saw where Abramm’s gaze had fixed.
    In the end, it wasn’t Rolland he convinced first.
    “I’ll go,” Marta Brackleford said, stepping forward from the group. Immediately Kitrenna shrieked and threw herself on her sister, forbidding her to do so. Marta pushed her off. “If you wish to spend the night out here shivering to death on that ledge, that is your choice. If you die because of it, it is still your choice. But it is not mine, and I think Alaric is right when he says that trail is Eidon’s protection for us.”
    “You see the light on the trail, too?”
    “No. But I believe he can, and I have made my choice.” She shook her sister off and started toward Abramm, stopping in front of him a few steps later, since he stood blocking the path. “I’ll see if I can get them to open the gate,” she told him.
    He shook his head in unabashed admiration. “You shame us all with your courage, my lady.”
    She smiled. “We walk in Eidon’s Light, sir. Why should I not be courageous?”
    She set off up the path at a brisk walk, boot soles squeaking against the snow.
    When Abramm turned back, he saw Rolland had pressed through the gathering to meet his wife midspan. He was speaking to her softly. She looked up at him, eyes wide with fear, her face pale within the ice-clotted edge of her hood. But when he swung his middle son into his arms, then took hold of the shoulder of his eldest and pressed him forward through the group toward Abramm, she followed, clutching the bundle that was their toddler to her chest. The dark-haired shepherd Cedric Ashvelt and his elderly father followed next, then young Galen and Jania Gault, and that was enough to decide the rest of them. Though she held out until the end, even Kitrenna at last bowed to the majority, and soon they were all hastening up the path.
    Abramm brought up the rear.