Read Online Towers of Midnight by Brandon Robert; Sanderson Jordan - Free Book Online Page B

of thirteen had golden hair from his father’s side.
    Almen rubbed his chin, scratching at a patch of whiskers he’d missed during shaving. Hahn, Adim’s older brother, approached them. The lad had carved Almen a set of wooden teeth as an arrival gift earlier in the spring. Wondrous things, held together by wires, with gaps for the few remaining teeth he had. But if he chewed too hard, they’d go all out of shape.
    The rows of trees were straight and perfectly spaced. Graeger—Almen’s brother-in-law—always had been meticulous. But he was dead now, which was why Almen had come. The neat rows of trees continued on for spans and spans, carefully pruned, fertilized, and watered.
    And during the night, every single one of them had shed their fruit. Tiny apples, barely as large as a man’s thumb. Thousands of them. They’d shriveled during the night, then fallen. An entire crop, gone.
    “I don’t know what to say, lads,” Almen finally admitted.
    “You, at a loss for words?” Hahn said. Adim’s brother had darker coloring, like his mother, and was tall for his fifteen years. “Uncle, you usually have as much to say as a gleeman who’s been at the brandy for half the night!” Hahn liked to maintain a strong front for his brother, now that he was the man of the family. But sometimes it was good to be worried.
    And Almen was worried. Very worried.
    “We barely have a week’s grain left,” Adim said softly. “And what we’ve got, we got by promises on the crop. Nobody will give us anything, now. Nobody has anything.”
    The orchard was one of the largest producers in the region; half the men in the village worked it during one stage or another. They were depending on it. They needed it. With so much food going bad, with their stores used up during the unnatural winter…
    And then there was the incident that had killed Graeger. The man had walked around a corner over in Negin Bridge and vanished. When people went looking, all they found was a twisted, leafless tree with a gray-white trunk that smelled of sulphur.
    The Dragon’s Fang had been scrawled on a few doors that night. People were more and more nervous. Once, Almen would have named them all fools, jumping at shadows and seeing bloody Trollocs under every cobblestone.
    Now…well, now he wasn’t so sure. He glanced eastward, toward Tar Valon. Could the witches be to blame for the failed crop? He hated being so close to their nest, but Alysa needed the help.
    They’d chopped down that tree and burned it. You could still smell brimstone in the square.
    “Uncle?” Hahn said, sounding uncomfortable. “What…what do we do?”
    “I…” What did they do? “Burn me, but we should all go to Caemlyn. I’m sure the new Queen has everything cleared up there by now. We can get me settled right by the law. Who ever heard of such a thing, gaining a price on your head for speaking out in favor of the Queen?” He realized he was rambling. The boys kept looking at him.
    “No,” Almen continued. “Burn me, boys, but that’s wrong. We can’t go. We need to keep on working. This isn’t any worse than when I lost my entire millet field to a late frost twenty years back. We’ll get through this, right as Light we will.”
    The trees themselves looked fine. Not an insect bite on them, leaves a little yellowed, but still good. Sure, the spring buds had come late, and the apples had grown slowly. But they had been growing.
    “Hahn,” Almen found himself saying. “You know your father’s felling axe has those chips on it? Why don’t you go about getting it sharpened? Adim, go fetch Uso and Moor and their carts. We’ll sort through those fallen apples and see if any aren’t rotted too badly. Maybe the pigs will take them.” At least they still had two. But there’d been no piglets this spring.
    The youths hesitated.
    “Go on now,” Almen said. “No use dallying because we’ve had a setback.”
    The lads hastened off, obedient. Idle hands made idle