Read Online Aeralis by Kate Avery Ellison - Free Book Online Page B

over me and made my cloak curl around me.
    This was Aeralis.
    I’d seen it before when Korr and I had jumped a train and traveled to Astralux to rescue Adam, but that time, the world had whirled past in a blur. Now it stretched before me, unbroken and vast, a plain of dirty brown grass and a blank gray sky.
    I began walking.
    The whole day passed without any change in the landscape, until finally, as the sun was sinking, a dot appeared at the place where the fields met the sky. As I grew closer, a house took shape. Straggling fence posts formed a paddock to the left, and a lone barn huddled to the right. A single light glowed in an upper window.
    I stopped in a yard of packed earth. The farmhouse was large, built of thick gray timbers. The barn behind it was built of sod. I approached the house and rapped the knocker twice, with three beats of silence in between. A Thorns signal.
    Footsteps rang out on the other side, and the hinges groaned as someone cracked the door and peered out. Brilliant honey-brown eyes gazed at me, and the crack widened to reveal a young woman with thick black hair and a constellation of freckles one shade darker than her tanned skin. She was young, perhaps my age, but when she frowned at me, her mouth had a curve of perception that made her look much older. She sized me up with a glance of disinterest.
    “Can I help you?”
    I traced the sign of the Thorns in the dirt at my feet. A twinge of guilt filled me—my orders had been to remain in the Frost, and I was misusing information meant for other agents that I shouldn’t know in the first place—but it was only a twinge. I needed her help, and this was the only way she’d trust me.
    “Ah,” the girl said. “I see. And your name?”
    I straightened. “Bluewing.
    The girl’s eyes widened slightly, and her cynical smile faded. I felt the slightest nudge of pleasure that I’d managed to impress her.
    “I’ve heard of your triumph in the Frost,” she said, and stepped aside to let me in.
    “Are you Raven?” I asked.
    She smirked at the question. “My ma and da named me Nettie, but I won’t answer to it, so don’t bother. Besides, Raven is a much more appropriate description, don’t you think?” She flipped her dark locks and turned to shut the door behind us.
    The interior of the house was lit only by smoking kerosene lamps fastened to the walls. Farming equipment hung on hooks, and animal skins crowded the wood-planked walls. Old feed sacks were tacked into place in the empty place, and rusted firearms were mounted over a stone fireplace filled with smoldering coals. A haphazard stack of books dominated the corners of the room, and one stack replaced the fourth leg of a table beneath a window. The floorboards creaked beneath our boots.
    “What is this place?” I asked.
    “It’s an inn,” Raven said, clicking her tongue against her teeth as if disapproving of my inability to deduce that fact from the jumble of incomprehensible objects. She gestured around us. “These things are just for decoration. The visitors from the city like it. Makes it seem rustic. We keep the real goods in the barn.”
    I wandered close to the fireplace. One of the guns looked like the one that had belonged to my father. I reached out a hand.
    “Careful,” she said. “Those are real. I like to keep them close in case soldiers come calling.”
    I pulled my hand back.
    “I wasn’t expecting another operative,” she said.
    Another . Of course. Adam and Ann had passed through here only days ago.
    “I’m bound for Astralux,” I said. “But I’ll need directions. I don’t know the way.”
    “Of course,” she said. “I can get you a map. A horse, too.”
    “Thank you.”
    “I’m a Thorns operative,” Raven said. “It’s my job.” She murmured something about seeing to my room and headed for the stairs.
    Loneliness tore through me as I stood alone in the dim room and thought of my family, my home. I was lost without that bright blue sky and