Read Online Word & Void 02 - A Knight of the Word by Terry Brooks - Free Book Online

they hadn’t parted under the best of circumstances. John Ross had come to Hopewell to accomplish one of two things—to help thwart her father’s intentions for her or to make certain she would never carry them out. He had seen her future, and while he would not describe it to her, he made it clear that it was dark and horrific. So she would live to change it or she would die. That was his mission in coming to Hopewell. He had admitted it at the end, just before he left. She had never quite gotten over it. This was a man she had grown to like and respect and trust. This was a man she had believed for a short time to be her father—a man she would have liked to have had for a father.
    And he had come to kill her if he couldn’t save her. The truth was shattering. He was not a demon, as her real father had been, but he was close enough that she was still unable to come to terms with how she felt about him.
    “The difficulty for John Ross is that he cannot stop being a Knight of the Word just because he chooses to,” Ariel said suddenly.
    She had moved to within six feet of Nest. Nest hadn’t seen her do that, preoccupied with her thoughts of Ross. The tatterdemalion was close enough that Nest could see the shadowy things that moved inside her semitransparent form like scraps of stray paper stirred by the wind. Pick had told her that tatterdemalions were made up mostly of dead children’s memories and dreams, and that they were born fully grown and did not age afterward but lived only a short time. All of them took on the aspects of the children who had formed them, becoming something of the children themselves while never achieving real substance. Magic shaped and bound them for the time they existed, and when the magic could no longer hold them together, the children’s memories and dreams simply scattered into the wind and the tatterdemalion was gone.
    “But the magic John Ross was given binds him forever,” Ariel said. “He cannot disown it, even if he chooses not to use it. It is a part of him. It marks him. He cannot be anything other than what he is, even if he pretends otherwise. Those who serve the Word will always know him. More importantly, those who serve the Void will know him as well.”
    “Oh, oh,” muttered Pick, sitting up a little straighter.
    “He is in great danger,” Ariel repeated. “Neither the Word nor the Void will accept that he is no longer a Knight. Both seek to bind him to their cause, each in a different way. The Word has already tried reason and persuasion and has failed. The Void will try another approach. A Knight who has lost his faith is susceptible to the Void’s treachery and deceit. The Void will seek to turn John Ross through subterfuge. He will have begun to do so already. John Ross will not know that it is happening. He will not see the truth of things until it is too late. It does not happen all at once; it does not happen in a recognizable way. It will begin with a single misstep. But once that first step is taken, the second becomes much easier. The path is a familiar one. Knights have been lost to the Void before.”
    Nest brushed at a few stray strands of hair that had blown into her eyes. Clouds were moving in from the west. She had read that rain was expected later in the day. “Does he know this will happen?” she asked sharply, almost accusatorily. She was suddenly angry. “How many years of his life has he given to the Word? Doesn’t he at least deserve a warning?”
    Ariel’s body shimmered, and her eyes blinked slowly, flower petals opening to the sun. “He has been warned. But the warning was ignored. John Ross no longer trusts us. He no longer listens. He believes himself free to do as he chooses. He is a prisoner of his self-deception.”
    Nest thought about John Ross, picturing him in her mind. She saw a lean, rawboned, careworn man with haunted eyes and a rootless existence. But she saw a fiercely determined man as well, hardened of purpose and