Read Online Jenna Starborn by Sharon Shinn - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Sharon Shinn
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order to redistribute that particular fortune. But it had nothing else we needed.
I felt an affinity for the sere, cold ball of insufficient elements, nonetheless, and I liked to spend my afternoons strolling through the park grounds surrounding the manor. Men had ferried in ships full of a renewable topsoil, merely so they could plant it with familiar seeds and grasses, so I walked across a green and pleasant lawn, enjoying commonplace flowers. But I wondered often what lay beneath that manicured surface, what rocky or sticky or completely unfathomable loam was the natural cloak of this world, and what fantastical trees and shrubs it would have produced on its own.
One such example was before me even as I made my afternoon rounds; I never failed to walk by it to express my intense, silent delight. It was a tree, of sorts, gnarled, twisted, and bulky, with massive, knotted limbs so contorted the tree might be supposed to be in agony. Yet its branches could have been made of iron, so impervious were they to axe or chain saw, and its roots must have extended to the center of this unfriendly earth. For the groundskeepers had tried, Mrs. Farraday had told me, to remove the tree with every device they could muster. They had attempted to poison it as a seedling, to hack it down as a sapling, to uproot it, burn it, detonate it. It would not die. It would not even cower back. It bore, to this day, scorch marks on its lower branches and a crisscross of machete tracks along its trunkâbore these marks as proudly and unregenerately as a soldier bears his scars of battle.
Nobody knew what the tree was, though it had been dubbed the oxenheart. Apparently it was a hybrid of sorts, part import, part native, though its indigenous cousins had been cleared away without incident when Fieldstar was first being settled. Some combination of foreign and familiar cells had given it the tenacity to endure any humiliation, any vilificationâand not only to survive, but thrive.
I loved the moral implicit in that; I wanted desperately to believe that willpower and chemical makeup could make you stronger than your surroundings. I was a transplant myself, a hybrid sowed in uncertain soil. I hoped to grow just as strong, just as stubborn, just as irrepressible as the oxenheart tree.
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W henever I made my way around the environs of Thorrastone Manor, I did not neglect another significant part of my duties: checking the glimmering edge of the forcefield to make sure it did not show any signs of stress. It should not, if my reactors were functioning properly, but sometimes a lapse in the product was the first sign a tech would have that the machinery itself was experiencing a malfunction. So I strolled down the edge of the property and made sure there were no gaps in the iridescent fencing.
More than once my wanderings took me near the minersâ compound, and I stood at the edge of the domestic grounds, looking toward the forbidden property. I did not think I would be doing anyone a disservice if I continued to circle the entire perimeter of the forcefield, checking for trouble. But I held back and did not cross the invisible line into the restricted territory. Mrs. Farraday would hear of my trespass, no doubt, and she would be hurt at my disobedience and frightened of the connections I might make. My curiosity was not a good enough reason for me to cause her anxiety.
So I looked, wished, and turned back to my assigned area. Others, I learned one day, were not so docile.
This was a day as fine as Fieldstar offered, which was to say overcast and gray, but bright with a strange, reflected light that made my eyes squint against the glancing rays. The sun was so far away that its heat was insufficient to sustain human life; it provided adequate light but never achieved the brightness I had become used to on double-sunned Lora. The air, as always within the forcefield, was still and silent, and I fancied that even from a distance I
I felt an affinity for the sere, cold ball of insufficient elements, nonetheless, and I liked to spend my afternoons strolling through the park grounds surrounding the manor. Men had ferried in ships full of a renewable topsoil, merely so they could plant it with familiar seeds and grasses, so I walked across a green and pleasant lawn, enjoying commonplace flowers. But I wondered often what lay beneath that manicured surface, what rocky or sticky or completely unfathomable loam was the natural cloak of this world, and what fantastical trees and shrubs it would have produced on its own.
One such example was before me even as I made my afternoon rounds; I never failed to walk by it to express my intense, silent delight. It was a tree, of sorts, gnarled, twisted, and bulky, with massive, knotted limbs so contorted the tree might be supposed to be in agony. Yet its branches could have been made of iron, so impervious were they to axe or chain saw, and its roots must have extended to the center of this unfriendly earth. For the groundskeepers had tried, Mrs. Farraday had told me, to remove the tree with every device they could muster. They had attempted to poison it as a seedling, to hack it down as a sapling, to uproot it, burn it, detonate it. It would not die. It would not even cower back. It bore, to this day, scorch marks on its lower branches and a crisscross of machete tracks along its trunkâbore these marks as proudly and unregenerately as a soldier bears his scars of battle.
Nobody knew what the tree was, though it had been dubbed the oxenheart. Apparently it was a hybrid of sorts, part import, part native, though its indigenous cousins had been cleared away without incident when Fieldstar was first being settled. Some combination of foreign and familiar cells had given it the tenacity to endure any humiliation, any vilificationâand not only to survive, but thrive.
I loved the moral implicit in that; I wanted desperately to believe that willpower and chemical makeup could make you stronger than your surroundings. I was a transplant myself, a hybrid sowed in uncertain soil. I hoped to grow just as strong, just as stubborn, just as irrepressible as the oxenheart tree.
Â
Â
W henever I made my way around the environs of Thorrastone Manor, I did not neglect another significant part of my duties: checking the glimmering edge of the forcefield to make sure it did not show any signs of stress. It should not, if my reactors were functioning properly, but sometimes a lapse in the product was the first sign a tech would have that the machinery itself was experiencing a malfunction. So I strolled down the edge of the property and made sure there were no gaps in the iridescent fencing.
More than once my wanderings took me near the minersâ compound, and I stood at the edge of the domestic grounds, looking toward the forbidden property. I did not think I would be doing anyone a disservice if I continued to circle the entire perimeter of the forcefield, checking for trouble. But I held back and did not cross the invisible line into the restricted territory. Mrs. Farraday would hear of my trespass, no doubt, and she would be hurt at my disobedience and frightened of the connections I might make. My curiosity was not a good enough reason for me to cause her anxiety.
So I looked, wished, and turned back to my assigned area. Others, I learned one day, were not so docile.
This was a day as fine as Fieldstar offered, which was to say overcast and gray, but bright with a strange, reflected light that made my eyes squint against the glancing rays. The sun was so far away that its heat was insufficient to sustain human life; it provided adequate light but never achieved the brightness I had become used to on double-sunned Lora. The air, as always within the forcefield, was still and silent, and I fancied that even from a distance I
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