The Art of Hunting Read Online Free Page B

was with you when she died
, she wanted to say.
In your loneliest moments, I was there beside you. In my mind I
held your hand and kissed your brow and loved you.
But she couldn’t talk of this, not even in a dream.
    ‘Everyone knows you,’ she replied. ‘Son of King Jonas the Summoner and Queen Grace.’
    ‘Jonas the Summoner,’ he said. ‘That is one of the kinder epitaphs you could have chosen. Those who blame him for the downfall of my race call him Jonas the Whiteheart.’
His brow wrinkled and he pursed his lips. ‘I’ve seen you before, Ianthe.’
    She shook her head.
    ‘Yes. Twice. Once with Briana Marks . . . and then again at the palace entrance, after the attack. A man carried you away.’
    A man?
Ianthe couldn’t recall anything about that.
    ‘You were unconscious,’ the prince said. ‘Your rescuer wore Unmer armour and carried Unmer weapons, but he was human. A soldier, but not Haurstaf, his flesh had been badly
scarred by brine. He looked . . .’The prince snorted. ‘We have a saying in Unmer . . . The closest translation is: he looked like a battlefield.’
    Granger? She had peered through his eyes often enough, observed his brine-scratched hands gripping the wheel of the emperor’s stolen steam yacht as he pursued the Haurstaf
men-o’-war.
And destroyed them.
She recalled the battle, the cannon fire, the smoke and screams. Granger had harpooned their own vessel and dragged it behind him like a dragon
carcass, until Ethan Maskelyne had severed the cable. But then they had abandoned the sinking yacht. Granger had earned his death, for all his greed and for the suffering he had caused Ianthe and
her mother, and yet she had felt no desire to watch him drown.
    He had returned for her?
    ‘My family owe this man a debt of gratitude,’ Marquetta said. ‘We would reward him handsomely.’
    ‘Why?’
    ‘He freed us.’
    ‘No.’ She tried to recall what had happened, but her memories of the attack skirled like snowflakes in the wind. There had been a concrete cell. A Haurstaf soldier. A man in a white
coat. She remembered the door slamming shut, the soldier perspiring heavily.
    ‘Are you with him now?’ Marquetta said. ‘Does he watch over you while you dream?’
    They’d hurt her and she’d cast her consciousness away from that terrible place, dislocating herself from her own suffering. She had drifted through the Sea of Ghosts, that great void
of perceptions and in her anguish and fury she had . . .
    Oh, god.
    ‘Will you bring him to the palace at Awl?’ Marquetta said.
    What have I done?
    ‘You have my word that neither of you will be harmed.’
    A gust of wind lashed her hair. She felt hail sting her face. The returning thunder boomed like cannon fire.
A battle at sea.
And all around her the mountains appeared to swell. Why had
Granger taken her away? Why couldn’t he have just left her there to die?
    Marquetta glanced between Ianthe and the heavens. ‘I have made a mistake,’ he said. ‘This man . . . He didn’t rescue you. He abducted you?’
    Ianthe felt tears welling in her eyes. ‘He’s my father,’ she said. ‘You don’t understand.
He
didn’t free you. It was me. I killed them.’ She
began to sob. ‘I didn’t mean to, I . . .’
    She turned and ran.
    ‘Wait!’
    He seized her wrist.
    She shrieked.
    But he held on. ‘Ianthe, wait, please.’
    And suddenly she felt pain – an acid burn, as though his touch was scalding her. She saw blood trickle between his fingers, heard a crackle as his sorcerous touch banished her skin to
non-existence. He looked at her with horror, then immediately released her. ‘I didn’t,’ he said, his violet eyes fixed on her bloody hand. ‘I didn’t do that.
It’s your dream, you’ve imagined this, I swear.’
    Ianthe struck out – not physically, but with an instinctive mental blow intended merely to push the young man away. He flinched and then gave a sudden violent shudder. His face became
slack and he dropped to