The Dark Ferryman Read Online Free

before, thinking from the widening of their eyes that likely they had not although they’d undoubtedly heard many things about them. She knew what they would see, a tall, handsome folk with tipped ears and eyes as bright as gems with streaks and specks and whorls of color within color, eyes unlike any ever seen before on Kerith. Those eyes were not native to Kerith, belonging to a people some God or forbidden magic had flung into their world centuries ago for reasons the Vaelinar could not remember and the races born to Kerith had no way to discern. She knew what they thought if they thought the worst of them: invaders, slavers. She took a deep breath, feeling the old manacle scars prickle high on her wrists. All but faded, the pain could still chafe at her now and again. Vaelinars were often no kinder to their own than to others. Hammered onto Kerith, they had suffered no less damage to themselves and their culture than this valley had from the Demon Rakka. She dropped the reins of her horse into a ground-tie and stepped away, letting a soft smile curve across her lips, hoping it would ease the looks she faced.
    Lariel had been ill at ease, and no wonder. The Vaelinars were strangers in the lands of Kerith, their existence here at the forbearance of the native peoples. Or perhaps not forbearance, perhaps they’d supplanted those originally in control here. Yet they weren’t exactly conquerors, although they were treading a fine line there. The Vaelinars had brought with them intelligence, experience, and magic, and used all they had to establish new domains among those who had been born here.
    Rivergrace had been isolated from her people for most of her young life and had only recently started to know them intimately, her previous view of them that of her adopted family of Dwellers who had long protected her from her strange beginnings. Vaelinars guarded each other’s backs from the native peoples of Kerith, yet within their own society they could be vicious and deadly as the assassins sent after Lara proved. The queen faced not only murderers from within but civil war from without. Her own seneschal Tiiva, head of her household staff for many, many years, had sent death after her before disappearing. Did Lara think that Tiiva had conspired with Abayan Diort? If she did, the Warrior Queen hadn’t confided that to Rivergrace, but there was a doggedness about this pursuit that suggested it.
    Grace didn’t understand the politics of the Vaelinars and took what solace she could in the countryside, looking at it with the eyes of a Dweller as Lariel and Osten approached the head of the raggedy caravan. Her feet took her wandering off to the side, to the bed of the river that had been, and she knelt there, reaching out. She sifted the pebbles and soft dirt and sand, thinking of the fish that had swum in the river once, their fins fanning the sediment, of the water cold and harsh in the winter and soft and languid in the summer. There were prints on the far side bank, from animals which had come to drink as if not believing the water had gone. A wilted weed tangled across her palm, drying out, dying, as the whole valley would, slowly. Rain and runoff might fill this riverbed again, but . . . she looked up. The hammer strike had shifted the rocks in the hills to block the water from the river, and she doubted it would ever run true again. Like high desert land, rain would fall here and sweep away, disappearing into porous, infertile sand that would not, could not, hold it. The river’s source spoke to her from the depths of stone, a wounded presence that struggled to be free, to be whole. She sighed.
    A tiny sigh echoed hers, and she looked up into a small, oval face. A hand reached past hers to finger the dirt. “Grampa says we hafta leave because of the river. Without the river, we can’t live.” The Kernan lad looked askance at her, brown eyes crinkling a little at the corners, as if she were too bright to watch