Read Online Geist by Philippa Ballantine - Free Book Online

his shoulder. The rest of the crew were busying pulling for the ship and bantering among themselves. “There was a little trouble while you were gone.”
    He opened his right hand to reveal the weirstone that had cost almost a chest of gold to obtain. The polished orb was cobalt blue, but every few moments a sheen of white gleamed over the surface. This had nothing to do with the light. Raed knew it was heavy but Aachon carried it as if it were a child’s toy—that, it most definitely was not.
    Deacons were not the only ones to commune with the unliving; they were just the best trained. Aachon’s family had always been seers; hence the Unsung’s choice of him as Raed’s protector. But Aachon’s skill was not of the first order, and it was only with the acquisition of the weirstone that he was able to See into the ether.
    Raed dared a glimpse into the orb. The stone thinned the barrier between the beyond and the real world. It was a very dangerous thing, and it made the hair on his arms stand up, but it had saved them all on numerous occasions. “What sort of trouble?” he asked through a dry throat.
    “A couple of shades on top of the cliffs. Probably the souls of people lost in a wreck of some sort.”
    Raed concealed a shudder as best he could. As always the image of his mother’s horrified face flashed in his eye, the taste of her blood in his mouth. Not for the first time did he wish that suicide was an option. If only his sister, Fraine, wasn’t next in line for the title Pretender and the Curse that went with it.
    He just had to do his best by staying on the ocean. It would have almost served Felstaad right if he’d run across a geist in his court . . . almost. That was the danger of dry land: the constant threat of geists. If they had crossed his path on the cliff tops . . . He pulled his mind away from that possibility.
    And now they would be sailing toward another port, and with
Dominion
being pulled from her native environment, he would have no choice. “Well, maybe if I just stay on the beach with my feet in the water while we’re in Ulrich, everything will be all right.” He chuckled.
    Aachon frowned, never a connoisseur of Raed’s sense of humor at the best of times.
    The Pretender shook his head with a little sigh. “What other choice do we have, old friend?
Dominion
needs to be repaired and scraped down. She’s slow in the water and we’re leaking every time the sea gets rough. We can only survive if we can run.”
    It was actually possible to hear Aachon grind his teeth in frustration. Most people just used it as an expression; the first mate used it as a method of communication. He nodded reluctantly.
    They had reached the heaving sides of their ship. Raed scrambled up the side with the others while the rowboat was tied in close to her stern. He hadn’t been born to life on the open seas, but after so many years he was as nimble on deck as those who had been. Aloft in the rigging he might not be the fastest, but he had been known to climb up if an emergency called. He might be captain, but he was all too aware that it was a title he sometimes had to work at.
    Up on deck, the rest of the crew waited. They were a collection of every ethnic group on the continent, with a slight majority from the warmer southern climes where the legend of the Unsung still might mean something. Most were male, though several women had also tied their fortunes to the Pretender. Now all were looking at him and waiting for the word on how his petition had gone.
    “Well”—he grinned at them—“as I remembered, Felstaad is a bastard.”
    They snickered at that, but held back the belly laughs until certain of the outcome.
    “But I finally convinced him that he might want to at least cover all the angles and give us brief sanctuary. He’s allowing us to make use of Ulrich harbor.”
    As expected, his announcement wasn’t greeted with uproars of delight. Several whispers murmured through the crew as some of