Read Online Ghost's Sight by Morwen Navarre - Free Book Online Page B

sack made him begin to cough. His eyes watered, washing more dirt into them. The situation was not helped when the sack was pulled off his head.
    Through the tears blurring his vision, Ghost looked up at his captor, who was as tall as Mother and much broader across. The man glowered down at him, speaking with a harsh accent that Ghost could not quite place.
    “Shut up,” the man growled. “Draw the fucking sind down on us with your fucking noise.”
    Ghost could not help coughing, the dust in his nostrils and down his throat choking him. He glowered at his abductor without thinking. The blow that landed on his cheek came out of nowhere, and his head snapped to the side. He gulped for air, tasting blood, panic making him try to roll away, but the large man simply grabbed him again. Ghost gagged on the bloody saliva that filled his mouth.
    The man froze for a moment, his eyes narrowed as he reached down to brush Ghost’s hair back, thick fingers buried in the pale strands.
    Ghost felt the pressure growing behind his eyes, knowing his mark had to be glowing. He could feel the warmth of it against his skin already. He swallowed hard against the twisting of his stomach.
    “You’re a witch,” the man said, fear in his voice. “Never saw a male witch before, but you have a mark.”
    Ghost looked up, registering the way the stranger was dressed, a darker patch on the shabby leathers in the shape of a ranger’s guildmark. His stomach twisted again. The rangers were outside the normal laws, but they had a code of their own. As loose as that code was, they had been known to strip rank from those who broke it. He struggled to get past his fear and remember what the Witch had taught him about rangers. There was a chance that this bastard still thought like one, enough for Ghost to use to his advantage.
    Rangers left witches alone. That was the fact that Ghost’s mind seized on, and refused to let go of, the fact that rangers and witches did not interfere with each other, or at least not in the normal course of things. Rangers kept to the lawless places, the ruins of the old cities where they scavenged what was left of the ancient witchery. Sometimes they would trade useful bits of lore and things they found to the witches in return for healing and salves. The rangers understood that the witches would hunt down anyone who harmed one of their sisterhood, would make a man regret having ever drawn that first breath when a dam pushed a babe out into the world. They had seen what was left of a man as a warning, after the witches had exacted their price.
    The rangers also fed the slave trade over in the decadent West. They normally preyed on those foolish enough to scavenge the old places alone, or travelers not wise enough to join a merchant caravan. Sometimes they would slip into a village at night to scoop up the ragged urchins orphaned by a flux or some other event, children not lucky enough to have found an alpha to protect them. Ghost realized that he must have presented a perfect target as he wandered in the woods, distracted by his thoughts. It was not a comforting realization.
    The man was looking at Ghost with those narrowed eyes. It was a mystery as to what was going on behind them. Ghost could not read people well, and right now he was afraid, fighting the urge to scream. He had to force himself to draw a deep breath so he could say something, maybe talk his way into being released. It was the slimmest of hopes, but Ghost clung to it.
    “I have a mark,” Ghost agreed, hearing the shiver in his own voice.
    The man’s hand tightened in Ghost’s hair, making the apprentice wince. “They made it in gems. How did they do that?”
    “I’ve had it for as long as I can remember,” Ghost replied. “Maybe the Seeker placed it there herself.”
    It was hardly an answer, and Ghost’s remark earned him a violent shake.
    “Maybe you can ask her yourself, when you see her,” the man said. The threat in his eyes was enough to