Read Online Blackbringer by Laini Taylor - Free Book Online

toward the Ring slowed behind their lurching gait.
    But Snoshti went on whistling, and why not? Her lass was back. She’d been saving this song for over eighty years.
     
    Talon Rathersting spotted the vultures from the north tower of the castle where he was daydreaming his way through guard duty. Rathersting Castle, peering out from a great hollow yew on the stony east slope of Dreamdark Crag, commanded a view of nearly the entire forest. Every winged thing that swept its way across could be seen from here by those with the eyes for it, and today there were more wings on the wind than usual. The crows had drawn Talon’s notice only an hour ago, but they’d made right up the Wendling for distant Never Nigh. Talon had been there only twice in his life; his folk seldom mingled with those Never Nigh flibbertigibbets with their fancy hair and ribbons and baubles, but well he knew that no unwelcome creatures could slip through the spells that twined round the city. It was the safest place in the world. So after the crows disappeared into the trees, he’d returned to his daydreams, unconcerned.
    The vultures were different. Talon leapt atop the tower’s crenellations and trained his eyes on them. There were a half dozen, moving with grim purpose just above the treetops, their wings vast, too vast. There were no vultures in Dreamdark. These birds were a long way from home. His daydreams forgotten, he visioned the glyph for the deep chime that would summon his cousins and he watched to see where the vultures’ path would lead.
    His cousins arrived on wing almost at once from their own guard posts around the ancient tree. They were a fearsome sight, these Rathersting warriors, lean lads just across the threshold of manhood, their shoulders and sharp cheekbones patterned with coal-black tattoos, no two alike. Talon wore the tattoos too, though he was yet a lad. And he wore something they didn’t, a circlet of woven reeds on his wild pale hair.
    “Prince,” said his cousin Shrike, alighting beside him on the tower’s high wall. “What is it?”
    “There.” Talon pointed. “Vultures, from beyond. Monsters. Six of ’em.”
    They looked. Wick whistled low. “Nasty meat.”
    “Aye. Fetch the chief,” ordered Shrike, and Wick dove over the edge of the tower, dropping nearly to the rampart before snapping open his wings and whirring away into the deep courtyard of the hollow yew.
    By the time the chief came the vultures had sunk into the forest near the upsweep of the great spine of rock where the Magruwen’s temple lay in ruin. “At Issrin Ev, sir,” Talon told him, pointing. “They circled and went down less than a minute ago.”
    The chief of the Rathersting clan was a formidable faerie. Coming on seven hundred years old, his beard had gone silver but his hair was still white-gold and gleaming, like Talon’s. He was thick in the chest and narrow in the hips and he moved like a peregrine on the hunt, a few fast flicks of his wings launching him into a long deadly glide. He wore a dagger on each arm and each thigh and had slung his crossbow over his back. He looked at his son. “Good eyes, lad,” he said, and gripped Talon’s shoulder hard.
    Talon couldn’t feel proud, though, because he was already tasting the shame of what would necessarily come next. “Shrike, Wick, Corvus, come with me. We’ll see what we see, neh?” said the chief, his eyes flicking to his son and away. Talon pretended not to notice. He knew the look too well, the look where his father still, after a hundred years, seemed puzzled to have found himself with such a son. “Keep on the watch, son,” said he, heaving skyward. “We hunt!” he bellowed, and Wick and Corvus and Shrike launched after him, eager and blooded for danger.
    Talon watched them all the way and saw them breach the forest canopy just where the vultures had. At his shoulders his own stunted wings twitched with the yearning to follow them but he bit his lip. He would keep