Read Restoration (Rai Kirah) for Free Online Page A

cart, and shoved my way through the surging crowd. Crouching low, ducking my head, and using the cover of the overturned sledge, I grabbed the tangled straps and snapped them with a word of enchantment. Grasping the fallen man’s bloody hand around the corner of the sledge, I gave him leverage to get his feet under him. As soon as he was up, I backed away into the crowd.
    “ Tas vyetto” came a breathless whisper from the other side of the sledge.
    You’re welcome, I thought, already too far away for him to hear me say it. Would I could do more. I would have left him my knife, but his overseers were too close. If caught with a weapon, he’d lose a hand or an eye.
    I never saw the slave’s face, but I made sure to note that of the Derzhi, who was back among his guards and riding coolly toward the gates. He was perhaps fifty-five years old, tall and straight in the saddle. Women likely called him a fine figure of a man, handsome for his age, unscarred by weather or battle. But I thought his soft face vicious: his wide brow empty, his full lips gluttonous, and the round eyes set close beside his narrow nose devoid of human sympathy. Or perhaps I saw only the habitual cruelty in his hand and the lack of expression on that fine face as he beat a man to breaking while waiting idly for his path to be cleared.
    As I pushed back through the crowd to where my horse waited patiently beside the tinker’s cart, I felt a light touch upon my back. I whirled about. No one. But far across the passing crowd a tall woman stood staring my way, her dark eyes so penetrating, I would have wagered she could see the scars beneath my shirt. Her gown and veil were a brilliant green. Among the sea of shabby browns and grays, she stood out like a sprig of new grass in the desert. A party of riders came between us, and I scrambled into the saddle and rode onward. I needed no one to notice me.
    I reached the outer gates still unsettled with the incident, sure I should have done more, yet knowing that I could have used every scrap of my power and skill and changed the outcome not a whit. The slave and I would both have ended up dead.
    “Hold up there! Yes, you. Get off that bag of bones. Come here and let me look at you.” The mounted Derzhi who was patrolling the throngs of beggars, travelers, and beasts at Zhagad’s fortresslike outer gate waved his spear at me.
    Stupid. Stupid. Distracted by the incident with the slave, I had forgotten to mask my Ezzarian features when I approached the gate. Aleksander had revoked the law that required Ezzarians to be enslaved, but Ezzarians still caught the eye of soldiers, and the slave marks burned into my face and my left shoulder would forever leave me vulnerable to suspicion. The gate guard moved closer, and people fell away, leaving a path between us.
    I felt for the leather packet tucked into my shirt, and, trusting that Aleksander’s paper would prove sufficient as it had in the past, I dismounted and approached the warrior.
    As did all the Derzhi guards in Zhagad, he went shirtless in the heat, exposing massive, bronze-colored shoulders, one of them crossed by a dreadful scar. “Zakor! Over here,” he called to one of his fellows. “I believe I’ve found me a runaway.” The guard’s spear point pricked my neck, forcing me to turn my head to show him the falcon and the lion burned into my cheekbone on the day I had been sold to Aleksander. The Derzhi smiled and licked his lips, no doubt anticipating the pleasure of hacking off the foot of a runaway slave and the rewards of delivering him to the royal slave master.
    Controlling the fury that welled up at his bloodthirsty glee—and a gut-gnawing anxiety that had not quite vanished in the years since my release—I reached up with my right hand and grabbed the shaft of his spear, holding it away from my throat. With my left, I held out the worn parchment, making sure the imperial seal was clearly visible. My voice remained even. “Indeed you have