The Palace of Impossible Dreams Read Online Free Page A

Perhaps, like you, she will find a good master and gain the very protection she went into the deserts of Torlenia to seek.”
    Tiji couldn’t really answer that, and in the end she didn’t have to, because at that moment a school of dolphins surfaced beside the
Liberator
’s bow and began racing the little sloop across the waves. At the shout of delight from the Crasii at the helm, which alerted them to the dolphins’ presence, everyone on board hurried to the side to watch them leaping out of the water, laughing delightedly at this good omen.
    Despite herself, Tiji couldn’t help but be enchanted by the smiling creatures leaping so joyfully across their bow. She was soon laughing so hard she could pretend, for a time at least, that Arkady’s fate wasn’t going to be as bad as she feared.

Chapter 3
    Declan Hawkes woke to the sound of rain on the shingles. He lay there for a time, in the darkness, listening to the downpour, the sound comforting and ordinary. It was just before dawn; his ability to sense such things now magnified beyond belief since surviving the fire that had made him immortal.
    A few feet away, on the other pallet they’d crammed into the lean-to beside Maralyce’s cabin to cater for this influx of unexpected visitors, Stellan Desean’s deep even breathing indicated the former Duke of Lebec was still sound asleep. Declan guessed the others in the cabin would still be asleep too. Shalimar would be snoring softly on the pallet in front of the fire, while Nyah, the little princess Declan had rescued from Caelum, would be curled up in a ball beside Maralyce, still not used to having to share a bed with anybody.
    It wasn’t long, however, before other things intruded on Declan’s peaceful contemplation. He could feel things now that he’d never felt before; knew things—like exactly what time it was—without knowing how. He could, if he concentrated, feel every single raindrop, sense the tension that held its shape, and its pain as it splattered on the ground. It was as if, along with immortality, he had acquired another sense; one that let him touch things on a hidden level not accessible to mortal men. The ability both fascinated and frightened him because he knew what it was.
    He was touching the Tide.
    Maralyce had tried to explain it to him, sensing his gift even before he knew about it, although she hedged around acknowledging his ability in so many words. She knew a lot—this immortal who’d turned out to be his great-grandmother—that she wasn’t sharing with anybody. She knew things about Declan; things about his mother and things about his grandfather that Shalimar didn’t know about himself, and she dribbled the information out like tidbits fed to a puppy one was patiently training to be a loyal and well-behaved companion.
    She also knew—Declan was quite certain—the identity of his father, a mystery that had, until now, never bothered him overly much. His grandfather, Shalimar, was a foundling raised in a Lebec brothel, after all. His long dead grandmother was a whore and his mother was born there too. She had grown up in the house and inevitably worked there until she diedof consumption when Declan was still a small child. Given his mother’s profession, the number of men who might have fathered him ran into the thousands and Declan had never really felt the need to sift through such a sordid list of names—had such a list existed—to find the culprit.
    Until now.
    Until the list had shrunk from hundreds of faceless strangers to a handful of immortals he could actually name.
    It was, he had decided, the only explanation for his immortality. He had survived the fire in the prison tower because he wasn’t
just
half-immortal like his grandfather, who was dying from the effects of being mortal and having the same ability to touch the Tide so recently awakened in Declan. No, he’d survived