Read Online Aster Wood and the Blackburn Son by J B Cantwell - Free Book Online Page A

raised.  
    “Me and the girl?” I asked.  
    “I was tracking you,” he said, a mischievous smirk playing around his lips.
    “You were?” I asked, surprised. “Why didn’t you let us know you were there? We could have used the help.” The thought of help being so close, but withheld, stung.
    “I would have,” he said, “but I was on the other side of the valley. It was with this,” he held up a long, thin spy scope, “that I saw you.”
    I reached out for the telescope and held it up to my eye, training it towards Stonemore. From here, I could see the people in fine detail. And we were at least a mile away.
    Owyn turned to Kiron and the rest of the group.
    “That’s how I found you all today,” he said. “When you landed here, a shockwave preceded you. I looked over the countryside using this, and it didn’t take me long to locate you.  
    “I had been waiting on the outskirts of the city, hoping you would show yourselves. I wasn’t about to set foot back in that place after what I saw on the roads. People smiling and guffawing like idiots. I knew something was amiss, so I waited. And sure enough, when I saw the pink and purple buildings, I knew there was trouble.” He laughed again and looked pointedly at the garb on the surrounding men. “Now I can see it for certain.”
    But I wasn’t amused.
    “Why didn’t you find me after?” I asked, my voice rising. “I was alone. Almara was dead. I spent months out in the wilderness on my own after what happened. And you didn’t so much as show yourself?”
    Owyn’s smile faded again, but this time there was pity in his eyes, not malice.
    “I had to choose,” he said, more serious. “The girl had gone, and I could tell something wasn’t right. When I saw you recover, leave the mountaintop, I knew you would be alright, at least for a time. So I followed the girl instead. She seemed…off, somehow.”
    I laughed, though I wasn’t amused in the slightest. The men around us stayed silent.
    “You’re lying,” I said. “You can’t follow someone into a jump. You weren’t there. You weren’t touching her.”  
    Something about Owyn’s demeanor was troublesome to me. He seemed too happy, too carefree. He was not the severe man I had met and freed in the dungeons, though the face beneath his tasteless smile was the same. What had happened to the great leader I had met so many months ago? To the man who had once, himself, followed Almara on his original quest?
    “You can follow someone into a jump,” he said, “only that is a relatively new discovery.”
    Kiron stepped forward, standing between us, and spoke.
    “When you left Stonemore,” he said, “and after Cadoc was done away with for good, Owyn and I found a cache of gold under the treasure hold. It’s barely enough to use at all, maybe not even enough to make a single link. But none of us had ever had the chance to study gold. We spent weeks examining it, hoping that if we were able to learn more about its properties, we might also learn where to find more. We also found this.”  
    He held out his hand to Owyn, who fumbled in a pocket and produced a glass ball the size of his fist. He held it out to me, dropping it heavily into my hand. I turned it in the fading light, and saw that inside a fine ribbon of gold was suspended, like colored glass within a marble.
    “We call this a chaser ,” he went on. “We knew it was a link when we found it, and powerful with the gold inside, but we didn’t know the command or where it went. Cadoc had kept it all those years, the fool, and never knew what he had. One day we brought it out of the city, to a place not far from here, to experiment with it, hopin’ it would prove valuable. And that it did.”
    “At first we used all the common commands,” Owyn said, stepping around. “Known words of power. But they got us nowhere. The thing would vibrate a little when we happened upon a command that spoke to it in some way, but we never went