On Fire's Wings - Christie Golden [0]
CHRISTIE GOLDEN
www.LUNA-Books.com
This book is dedicated to every woman who has feared her own power…and embraced it anyway
Contents
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Prologue
PART I
In the House of Four Waters
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
PART II
In the Shadow of Mount Bari
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
GLOSSARY
Coming Next Month
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS:
I would like to gratefully acknowledge the help and inspiration provided by the following people:
Robert Amerman and Mark Anthony, for being such terrific “wise readers”
Lucienne Diver and Mary-Theresa Hussey, for their enthusiasm and faith in this project
Michael Georges, my deeply supportive husband
Anastacia Chittenden, Lila Tresemer, Katherine Roske and all the women who have walked the Path of the Ceremonial Arts, for opening so many hearts to the Divine Feminine
…and my wonderful readers, past, present and future.
Prologue
The wind, cold and scented with death, seized the queen’s hair with cruel fingers and set it to dancing. Two weeks before, despite the queen’s years and the children she had borne, that long, thick hair had been only touched with gray. Now, there was little ebony left in the mane. The white of fear and resignation had swallowed the black, as the Shadow that loomed on the horizon had swallowed everything in the world save this lone castle and the few terrified souls it still housed.
She was tall, and stood tall even now, staring not at the rolling fields and forests and streams that would have met her gaze a fortnight past but at a pulsing blackness that mocked her defiance. She leaned forward, resting her hands on the cool strength of the stones that formed the wall of the parapet’s balcony. This, at least, was real, was solid—for the moment.
“It’s only been two weeks,” came a soft voice. The queen glanced down at the beggar boy who stood beside her, staring as raptly at the Shadow as she. There was puzzlement in the young voice, as if he, like the queen, could not truly believe that so much had happened in so brief a time. She closed her eyes, straightened, and her hands left the reassuring stone to wrap the thick embroidered cloak more closely about her frame.
“Less than that, little Lorekeeper,” she replied.
He did not say anything further, but she knew what he was thinking as if he had shouted it aloud: I didn’t know in time. Etched upon her memory, for the brief while she had left to live, was the look on the boy’s grimy face as he forced his way through crowds and guards with reckless determination. He had clutched desperately at her robe, uttering the words that chilled her to the bone: The Dancer needs help!
But the warning from the suddenly awakened memory of the base-born Lorekeeper had come too late, the queen thought bitterly, though it was no fault of the child’s. The wind stung her face, brought tears to her eyes. She blinked them back. Too late to save the Dancer, too late to salvage their own existence; too late, too late.
Following the boy, the king, accompanied by an elite group of guardsmen and his best healers, had stumbled across the body in an alleyway exactly as it had appeared to the boy in his vision. The Dancer, a youth as well-born as the Lorekeeper was base, had been robbed and murdered. His powers—probably unknown to him yet, he was terribly young—had not been sufficient to protect him. But he had rallied enough to exact revenge upon his slayer, it appeared, for the killer’s body was little more than a charred skeleton. The Dancer’s pouch, still filled with coins, lay a little distance away.
The king