The Western Wizard Read Online Free

of the sea.

PART 1

BÉARN’S RETURN

CHAPTER 1
Pudar’s Homecoming
    A half moon glazed light across the farm fields and forests of the central Westlands, and the sky seemed gorged with more stars than Colbey Calistinsson ever remembered seeing. Soldiers from a dozen different cities sprawled on grimy blankets or beds of piled leaves. Others gathered to talk or to play games with cards, stones, or dice, their laughter booming over the chorus of insects, the whirring calls of foxes, wolf howls, and the shy chitter of
wisules.
A general aura of fatigue still enwrapped the armies, even though three weeks had passed since the Great War ended, but triumph sweetened the exhaustion, tempering complaints and easing the grief over lost companions. Siderin had been defeated. The Eastlands had taken thousands of casualties; a long time would pass before they threatened the West again. And soon enough all the Westerners would be home.
    Home.
The word held little meaning for Colbey. Born during the Renshai’s hundred-year exile from the Northlands, he had spent his childhood rushing from battle to battle with his tribe, conquering, gathering food and plunder, celebrating those lucky enough to die in the glory of battle, mourning those who lost their lives to lingering injury or infection, and then charging into war again. When not engaged in battle, he practiced for it or taught the techniques to others. To Colbey, violence was simply a way of life. He knew no other.
    Yet, in a matter of days or weeks, that would change. Rache had died in the Great War, leaving Colbey as the only full-blooded Renshai in existence. And Colbey knew from experience that he could sire no children, even had there still been a Renshai woman with whom to try.
    These thoughts made Colbey frown. Standing just beyondthe protecting canvas of the officers’ quarters, he stared out over fields so fertile they seemed to flow into one another like a vast green ocean. Fifty years ago, he had stood in this same location, looking out over Westerners’ crops in the moonlight. Then, as always, his people had won the battle, but they had been the invaders not the defenders. Now, Colbey looked out over the campsites of five thousand men, nearly thirty-five hundred of them under his direct command, including the organized military of the great trading city of Pudar and the mustered farmers of dozens of tiny towns.
Colbey Calistinsson, the highest officer of the Westland’s largest army. The last of the Renshai led Westerners to war.
The irony gnawed at him, quickly replaced by a sense of obligation.
But I’m not really the only Renshai.
    Colbey knew that bloodline meant little. By their own ancient laws, sword skill, not breeding, defined the Renshai. Rache’s long-held belief that he was the last of the tribe had given him the right to teach the Renshai combat maneuvers to another. He had chosen Mitrian, the daughter of a town leader named Santagithi, who was the general of the remaining soldiers in the camp and the West’s master strategist.
    A good choice.
Mitrian had a natural grace and dedication to the art; logically, Colbey supported Rache’s decision. Yet deep within, he could not help wondering if it would have been better to let the Renshai remain dead in the eyes of the world after the bloody slaughter by neighboring Northmen that had destroyed all of the Renshai except Rache and himself. He thought of the red harvest of violence that the Renshai had once casually reaped across the world, spurring a hatred so deep that, in some countries, simply speaking the name was cause for execution.
Better for all, perhaps, if the “Golden-Haired Devils from the North” remained the corpses everyone believed them to be.
    Still, Colbey did not brood long over lost possibilities. Rache had fathered a son whom he would never see. The toddler lived with his mother in Santagithi’s Town. Mitrian and her husband Garn had left their only child, an infant boy, with a friend