Read Online Revelation (Rai Kirah) by Carol Berg - Free Book Online Page B

grandfather had built when he was young and the most powerful Warden in Ezzaria. He had set it on the top of a hill, though still under the trees, for the Weaver laid her enchantments of protection in the trees, and no Ezzarian would think of building a house unsheltered. But from Catrin’s porch, you could look out over the rolling rooftop of the forest, glimpsing the trails of smoke from scattered settlements and lights that flickered through the leaves like luminous fish in a dark ocean.
    “Is Mistress Catrin here?” I asked the drowsy-eyed young student who answered her door. A pile of books, scrolls, and blotted papers on Catrin’s worktable behind the boy gave evidence of a long evening of study.
    “She’s been summoned away,” said the boy, yawning hugely. “Not sure where. Said she’d be back before too late. You’re welcome in, as always, Master.”
    “Thank you, Howel, but I think not, unless . . . is Hoffyd in?” Catrin’s husband, a quiet scholar, was a good friend.
    “He’s not been home nigh on three weeks now.”
    “His sister’s not ill?” His demanding, ailing sister Ennit, who lived in a nearby village, was the only thing I knew that could draw Hoffyd from home now we had come back to Ezzaria.
    “No, sir. Mistress Catrin won’t say where he’s gone, not even to Mistress Ennit, and Mistress Ennit is about to pester all of us to death with her asking.”
    Unusual. Hoffyd was the least likely man in Ezzaria to be involved in a mystery. “Perhaps he’s hiding from Ennit, do you think?”
    The boy grinned. “Likely.”
    Seeing Howel’s books made me reconsider, and I did go in to wait for Catrin, taking the opportunity to poke through a few journals where Galadon had recorded his demon encounters. Howel seemed to be impressed that I would sit and study without Catrin’s direct orders, so he got back to his own work with diligence.
    I flipped through three thick cloth-bound books that covered some fifteen years of Galadon’s career as a Warden, but all of the entries, so meticulously recorded in my old mentor’s bold hand, were familiar. None spoke of demons who were not as we expected. There were several more journals on the shelf; Galadon had fought as a Warden for some thirty years. But instead of these I lifted out the large folio where Catrin kept copies of the Scroll of the Rai-kirah and the Scroll of Prophecy. The originals were in Ysanne’s care, kept in stiff paper cylinders in a stone box, but Catrin’s copies were exactly scribed and illustrated to match the originals.
    I read for an hour, forcing my eyes to stay on the spidery script, trying to decipher the archaic language anew from the page rather than speak the words in my head as I had learned them in my schooling. Perhaps a word had been dropped or altered by constant repetition. But I found no change. The story of the demons, the warnings against corruption, the chants and rituals, and the florid language of the prophecy of the Warrior of Two Souls were exactly as I remembered them. I marveled again at the brevity of the manuscripts, scarcely twenty pages between the two. Not much to chart the course of a race, much less that of the entire world.
    As I traced my finger over the carefully reproduced sketch of the winged warrior in one margin, I felt the familiar prickling in my shoulders so like the return of warmth to numbed flesh. Always it was there, just below the surface of my senses. Why could I feel it so vividly when it was only beyond the portal that I could change into my winged form? Nothing in any Ezzarian writing even mentioned the change, much less explained it. Until I had first experienced it when I was eighteen, we’d only had the drawing and the rumor of such a possibility.
    There in Catrin’s quiet room, with life at its lowest midnight ebb, I closed my eyes, held myself still, and focused on the sensation, blowing on it gently with the breath of my awareness as a freezing man blows on his last