Read Requiem for Free Online

antics as it repeated its flight out and back, staying well below the cliff line. As the hours slipped past, the kin-raven stayed near him, and each time the old man paused, the bird would land nearby and ask once again why he was here.
    Sunset found him still pressing westward into the gloom, accompanied by his dark companion. Still without hunger, thirst or weariness, he gave himself to walking. When the stars guttered to life and the blue-green moon pushed up behind him, the bird vanished, rising up and over the cliff top and vanishing to the south.
    “Love and madness,” he whispered to the night that he suddenly found himself alone in.
    Then, with the moon casting his shadow long upon the dark beach and reflecting back to him in the silver of his staff, Vlad Li Tam walked toward whatever waited ahead.
    Jin Li Tam
    A cold wind whispered across the deck, and Jin Li Tam pulled her coat tight around her as she paced fore and aft along the rail. They’d lowered their sails sometime in the night, and the ship now moved forward, the deck vibrating from an engine somewhere below and aft that she suspected was much like those that powered her father’s iron armada. The clouds that had hemmed them in two hours ago were breaking open as the wind rose, letting the moon and stars cast dim light over the quiet ship and the ocean that surrounded it.
    When she’d slipped from her cabin below deck, she’d checked Jakob in his crib after casting a glance toward the narrow bed where Lynnae slept. Her hosts had tried to give her and her son separate quarters—the captain’s quarters, no less—but she’d refused and had insisted that the three of them share a single stateroom and displace as few of the ship’s crew as possible. The regent, Eliz Xhum, had not seemed surprised by this. But the crewmen, already gazing upon her with something akin to adoration, now looked upon their Great Mother with a different kind of respect.
    As I intended, she realized. She needed their respect and any favor it might purchase her; she would bend their worship of her and her son into whatever tool or weapon she might use to accomplish the work she was made for. And beyond that: She needed to keep Lynnae near. It was bad enough, a mother bringing her child into this situation. She would not leave him unsupervised among these blood-loving savages.
    Not that she could stop them if they chose to take Jakob from her. She’d known this when she agreed to leave the Named Lands in the regent’s care, but she also believed her sister—the long lost Ire Li Tam—when she assured Jin that the boy would be safe. And her grandfather’s voice, tinny and far away, offered her a measure of confidence as well when it whispered from the beak of the golden bird.
    No such assurances for me. And yet, she stood here, committed to a path now difficult—if not impossible—to retrace, hundreds of leagues from home and sailing toward an empire she could only imagine … in order to kill its Crimson Empress.
    She paced another hour as the sky grayed with morning. As she walked, she counted the steps and quietly noted the few sailors that worked the deck. She’d already mapped most of the vessel, familiarized herself with most of the crew, and inventoried most of its armaments without effort. It was an instinctive hypervigilance drilled into her by her father and his siblings during a preparation that had begun before she had conscious memory. Each Tam was shaped to be an arrow fired into the heart of the world to do their father’s work, even as her father had been trained to do the same by her grandfather.
    Obedience without question; trust without doubt. Only these past two years, since Windwir’s fall and since becoming a parent and a wife, she’d questioned and doubted a good deal.
    “And yet I’m still here,” she whispered.
    “Yes,” a voice whispered near her elbow, “you are.” She jumped at the sound of it and spun, reaching for knives she did not