Read Online Endless Night by D.K. Holmberg - Free Book Online Page B

his wrists.
    “Yes. You escaped,” Cheneth said with an uneasy sigh.
    “What was that ?” he demanded.
    “Watch yourself, Master Bestrun,” Cheneth said. “You told me they attempted to shape you. There are some with the ability to shape in such a way that you would lose control of yourself. What I did was only to determine whether such a shaping had been done.”
    “What you describe doesn’t exist.”
    “Trust me when I tell you that it does,” Cheneth said. “Now, describe to me exactly what you felt when you were in the Seat.”
    Oliver collected himself, rubbing at his wrists. There had been pain, but also a sense of helplessness, of knowing that he was in the presence of someone so much more powerful than him that he was little more than a child in comparison. It was much the same way he had felt with the commander the only times he’d seen him. The man who had sat at the head of the order before him had been a powerful shaper, but he had abilities others could understand. He had served in Atenas for nearly a dozen years. Lachen had come seemingly out of nowhere and was more powerful than anyone had been in centuries.
    “They did nothing. They called me before them and said nothing. I wouldn’t have known that they even shaped me were it not for the fact that I…”
    Cheneth tipped his head to the side. “You what?”
    “I used water to calm myself,” Oliver admitted. Shaping oneself wasn’t necessarily forbidden, but there were things that shapers didn’t do. Turning a shaping upon oneself was rightly considered dangerous. Most wouldn’t be able to control it, and even if they could, there was no guarantee the shaping would have the desired effect. It was the reason healers couldn’t heal themselves. Or hadn’t been able to heal themselves prior to Jasn Volth.
    “That would attune you, yes,” Cheneth said, mostly to himself.
    Oliver frowned. “Attune me to what?”
    “Don’t pretend you didn’t see the way Alena and Jasn shaped when they were here. Eldridge shared with me what happened.”
    “They are fully trained warriors and more powerful than me.”
    Cheneth smiled slightly. “You have no idea.”
    “There was something that prevented me from leaving. A shaping that wanted to hold me in place. And then… then I began to feel a strange crawling sensation in my mind.”
    Cheneth leaned back and took another drink of ale. When he was finished, he sat forward again and rested his elbows on the table. “You should not have recognized what they did. But then, you remained attuned. Interesting that it would work.” Cheneth fell silent, his fingers rubbing a pattern on his mug of ale before he looked up. “How did you manage to escape before the shaping took hold?”
    “I severed it with water.”
    “Hmm.” Cheneth built a shaping quickly and it sliced through the connection Oliver held to water, once again separating him from it. The effect was brief, only a heartbeat, but it made Oliver gasp once more. “Was it something like that?”
    “Would you stop doing that?”
    “Tell me. Was your shaping like that?”
    Oliver considered what he had sensed in the moment before he lost his connection to water. Cheneth had used a knife of a shaping, one so controlled that it had slipped underneath what he had managed to do to wrap himself in water. The edge of the shaping was so sharp that it had happened too quickly for Oliver to react.
    The control was more than even Oliver possessed, and he considered himself one of the most skilled shapers of water in the world.
    If this scholar could shape water like that, and without any warning, without any sign of what he did… He was much more powerful than Oliver would have expected.
    “Yes. It was much like that.”
    “Good. You see the way that I used it to pry beneath your shaping?” Cheneth asked. His voice had no condescending tone, only one that reminded him of all the teachers he’d ever had.
    Oliver nodded. What else could he do when