The Aware (The Isles of Glory Book 1) Read Online Free Page A

dead in a week, his healthy flesh literally eaten away into one open oozing sore… It was a vile way to go; I’d seen it happen once and I never wanted to see it again.
    The man next to me gripped my arm, his eyes narrowing. ‘I don’t think either of us are needed here after all,’ he purred in my ear. He nodded to the woman. ‘Sorry to have bothered you.’
    He pulled me out of the room and shut the door.
    Then, without another word, or even a glance in my direction, he went off up the passage the way he had come.
    The Stragglerman was right about one thing: we weren’t needed. And I’d been wrong about the Cirkasian woman—she didn’t need a protector. She already had all the protection she needed: sylvmagic. No wonder she could stroll so calmly into the taproom of The Drunken Plaice looking the way she did, without even bothering to wear a sword.
    I felt all the old stirrings of jealousy; dark, murky feelings that always shamed me, but which I could never quite control. Sylvmagic. Damn it. Damn her.
    As I returned to my room and reopened the shutters, I stopped feeling and concentrated on thinking again. Firstly, I could have sworn she hadn’t known that young man before she’d entered the taproom. Secondly, if she had sylvmagic, she must have known immediately that he was the unfortunate recipient of a dunmagic spell, even before he knew. Practitioners of sylvmagic had no ability to see dunmagic as I had, but they were more skilled at sensing the physical damage done by it. And so my next thought was: if it had been neither a previous acquaintance nor coincidence that had sent her to the seat next to that young man, then it must have been an acknowledgement of his need of her healing magic, his need of her protection. I decided the Cirkasian was as foolhardy as she was beautiful. A dunmaster could not sense from afar the annulment of one of his spells, but if he saw his victim again he could hardly fail to notice that he was alive and well. And a thwarted dunmaster tended to be a vengeful one.
    And the Stragglerman? His swift assessment of what he’d seen in the young man’s room and his subsequent remark seemed to indicate that he, like me, had Awareness.
    I stood at the window, looking down on the now deserted wharves, only half noticing the sea-mewlers as they squabbled over the fish remains, their normally pristine feathers bloodied with offal, their serrated beaks jabbing and slashing bad-temperedly at one another. I was thinking that the last thing I wanted to do was involve myself in affairs of magic; being Aware gave me protection against the magic itself, but those who practised dunmagic loathed both the Aware and sylvs. A wise possessor of Awareness, or a wise sylvtalent, kept their ability hidden around a dunmaster. There were many non-magical ways to die, after all.
    I felt a sick fear. I had a nasty feeling that magic, in the person of the Cirkasian, was mixed up in my affairs already. It seemed too much of a coincidence that, just when I was looking for a Cirkasian slave, this woman should turn up. Cirkasian women were rare enough outside the shores of the Cirkase Islands at the best of times; to find two on Gorthan Spit at any one time, without a connection between them, would have been quite a coincidence. I was after a particular slave girl and I was fairly sure she was on the Spit; I was even more certain that this could not be her—yet I felt there must be some connection. But what? It was puzzling. And worrying.
    My thoughts were swimming around in fruitless circles like pet fish in a jar, when a furtive movement from below caught my interest. The tapboy had sneaked out of the back door of the kitchen and was scuttling between the drying racks on the wharf. When a fishermen walked by carrying a lobster pot, the lad hid under some nets until he was gone. I watched, fascinated. It was like attending the theatre back in The Hub, the Keeper capital, and looking down on the stage from the