Read Path of Revenge for Free Online

but they had been kind to her, after a fashion, kinder at least than the tutors of Andratan, and so she had not been able to strike any of them with it. In the end she had settled for cloaking them with deep layers of sleep, enough to keep them immobile until evening.
    Though reassured, Noetos moved around the room as his daughter spoke, gathering things they would need if they had to leave. Opuntia saw what he was doing and followed suit.
    Hurrying, always hurrying, but still pitifully slow, Arathé told them her story, while Anomer translated. She had been taken to Andratan in honour, one with the Voice, capable of harnessing the wild Water magic. She would serve the Undying Man himself. Such honour! The first few weeks were marvellous, even though the cold fortress made her uncomfortable, as she learned from her masters how to manipulate the flows of Water magic bound withinher. So easily, so powerfully, could she wield it her teachers speculated that as the daughter of a fisherman she must have been exposed to a source of Water magic as a child.
    But soon she baulked at the demands the magic put on her—and, she noticed, on those around her. It seemed that the more she used the Voice, the more she drew…something…from those nearby. Her tutors began to bring servants and criminals to sit in the corner of the room where she trained, and at the end of each session they lay unconscious where they had fallen. She asked her teachers why this was so, and was not above shaping the questions with her Voice to draw out the answers she sought. Eventually she pieced together what no one would tell her: the magic of the Voice used the strength of others to operate.
    Arathé rejected her gift then, gentle child, and nothing her tutors said could change her mind. She had expected at worst to be put off the island, and had been shocked beyond belief when the hooded men came for her and took her deep beneath the fortress to the most dreadful place. She had cried out her tutors’ names at first, then when the men guided the knife towards her mouth she had shouted for her father, the last clear words she would ever utter.
    They had kept her there for an indeterminate time, then had taken her back up to the teaching rooms where her former tutors used her cruelly. They force-fed her to make her gain weight, and every day would place her in the corner of the room while some young acolyte or other learned how to harness the Voice. Drawing from her. None of the acolytes were as good as she had been, but she took little comfort from that.
    Six months ago she had become too weak even for such use, so had been put out of the castle and taken to a city called Malayu on the mainland. There theRecruiters had received her and pressed her into less onerous service, still draining her when the Voice or other magic was required, but far less often than on Andratan. Her periods of consciousness lasted much longer now, and she began to fight her new masters in ways they would not notice; at first a series of small defiances, then by teaching herself a language of sorts in case she ever had a chance to communicate. How she had wished she could speak to the eager youths of the Fisher Coast during her journey southwards, to warn them of what awaited them in Andratan, but she was never given a chance.
    She had wondered why they brought her southwards along the coast. Surely they could have assigned her to another Recruiting Cabal? Or did they know nothing of her history? Gradually it dawned on her that they saw her as completely powerless and had not bothered to ask her Andratan tutors anything about her past. There was little about her current appearance that marked her as one from the Fisher Coast, and so when the Cabal finally arrived in Fossa her masters truly had no idea that they had brought her home.
    Arathé had seen her father the previous night, dancing and drinking at the Fossan celebrations. Even though she’d hoped to meet her family, she had