Read Michelle West - The Sun Sword 02 - The Uncrowned King for Free Online

passing of years; no staining and wear with time, no timbers to be bowed by moisture or worse.
    But she did not often walk among those buildings.
    Certainly she had never come to them riding on the back of a beast several times her weight and with a vastly poorer temper.
    People stopped to stare, and although the roads here were almost as wide as the roads in the Common itself, they became crowded with curiosity seekers. Crowded, and hard to pass through. There were children underfoot—it astonished Aidan, to see children here, in the stronghold of the merchants, and he wished irritably that they would go back to their fathers or mothers or nursemaids.
    But even wishing it, he knew, guiltily, that had he been lucky enough to be in the streets when so many armed men were riding by, he would have stared, too. From a safer distance. Maybe.
    It was hot. Heat was one of the tests a man faced when upholding the Lord's honor. So the old man had said. The heat had never troubled Aidan.
    "That is because you've never spent a day in armor, let alone when your life depended on the wearing of it." He lifted a hand before Aidan could speak, although how he knew Aidan was going to speak, Aidan didn't know. He certainly couldn't see it from the back of his head. "In the Dominion, there are two kinds of armor that men wear. The most obvious is the armor you see on Andaro there; leather, metal, a thing upon which life depends. It can be bought if you've the coin for it, fashioned if you've the skill. It is second to only your horse or sword in importance. But armor wears; it breaks and it can be stolen. A fool with money can purchase the best. It takes no skill to wear it and little enough to learn how to put it on.
    "There are men who define themselves by the things they own, the things they buy. Owning these things, they put much of their wealth into hiring others to protect them." His tone of voice was deceptively soft. Aidan heard the steel in it, the winter chill. "But hiring others guarantees nothing. This is a lesson that the Tyr'agar himself—the king, if you will, of the Dominion—learned, to his regret. We all learn it, Aidan: there are times when the plans of other men will prevail." His voice became soft, and Aidan heard in that softness a hint of his mother's thoughtful distance.
    What are you thinking
? he would ask her when he saw that look. As a young child, he'd asked not because he wanted the answer, but because answering would bring her back to him, and he hated when she was far away. But as she got older, she would smile, sometimes sadly, and tell him,
I am thinking of far away
.
    Very far?
    Not so far that I can't reach it by making a quiet space for myself and taking time to think in it. And not so far that I can't be called back by you.
    That was how she told him she loved him.
    And now she was too far. He couldn't bring her back with anything as simple as a question because she couldn't hear him ask it.
    As if he could hear the sudden ghost of old pain, the old man continued, returning from the place that he'd been, just as Aidan's mother had. "There is armor that we wear in the service of, for the glory of, the Lord. And there is armor we wear as protection
against
him, for he tests us, always; he destroys the things that weaken us, and if we prove weak, he destroys
us
. He will not be served by the inferior.
    "This second armor I speak of, nothing pierces, nothing destroys. It cannot be bought, have you more money than a Tyr, and it cannot be made by any hand other than your own. Forge well, boy, and the world will never know that it can hurt you, and it will find some weaker man to torment in your stead."
    "Do you have it, this armor?"
    "Yes." The old man chuckled. "It does not stop pain, boy. Only death does that. But it prevents you from revealing the things that cause you pain. If they do not know the difference between the things that hurt you and things that do not, your enemies can make many