Read Shadowed By Wings for Free Online Page B

open.
    “Hey-o,” I murmured in wonder. “What have we here?”
    The array of tools within was a treasure. Reverently, I touched one of the sharp teeth of a saw, then picked up a hammer. As a woman, I should have had little knowledge of how to use such tools. But I’d had an unusual life, in Convent Tieron.
    I stood, said the customary quendi cinai farkta, the request to the Dragon that the chosen site meet with the bull’s favor, and looked about for a shovel to begin digging the latrine pit.
    One of the young apprentices mucking stalls spotted me and hailed another apprentice, a brawny fellow who stood atop a cart loaded with fresh fodder. The brawny fellow lumbered down from the cart and stalked toward me. I recognized him immediately: Egg, the oaf Dono had tried to goad into mounting me.
    I fumbled to cover my front with Kratt’s cape, which hung askew from my neck.
    With a scowl upon his massive face, Egg lurched toward me. A shadow crossed over him when he was but several feet away. He abruptly stopped and glanced at the sky. I likewise looked up.
    A carrion bird glided not far above our heads, swooping toward the great sandstone wall that surrounded the stable domain. Egg shuddered with relief at the buzzard’s deceptively nondescript appearance, then turned his scowl back on me. The bird looked at me from its perch and shook its feathers.
    “ ’Bout time you woke up,” Egg grumbled petulantly. “You can’t do that, y’know, sleep late while the rest of us work. You can’t. And you can’t walk around like that, neither.” He gestured at me as color burned up his swarthy neck. “Y’ have to wear somethin’ that covers all of you—”
    He cut himself short and his far-spaced eyes widened.
    “What happened to your cuts?” he squealed, no longer sounding the bear but a cornered wild pig. “Turn ’round, turn ’round!”
    I did so uneasily.
    A strangled noise gargled from his throat and he back-stepped several paces. “Where’d they go? How’d they disappear?”
    I gauged his reaction and calculated the possibilities. From the corner of my eye, I saw the carrion bird perched on the sandstone wall.
    I said, deliberately, “I’m the Dirwalan Babu.”
    “The what ?”
    “The Skykeeper’s Daughter.”
    Sure enough, his eyes shot skyward again and he involuntarily flinched, remembering the dreadful appearance of the Skykeeper at the Lashing Lane.
    “I heal like this sometimes,” I said with great certainty. “I have that power.”
    Egg’s eyes skittered over me like a bead of water dropped upon a hot pan. Slowly, his overlarge face folded in on itself. “Why do inductees have to be assigned to me?” he whined; then he flapped his hands as though shaking out wet laundry. “We got work to do, hey-o. We’ll get no food tonight if our work ain’t done, an’ he’ll flog us after without venom on the whips.”
    “I have a latrine to build.”
    “You’ve been assigned to me; didn’t you hear what I said?”
    “I heard.”
    He stared at me, fat lips quivering. I refused to drop my gaze as a woman should before a man.
    He grabbed his oily curls and pulled. “You ain’t a veteran, y’know. You can’t do what you like. You ain’t even a servitor. You’re an inductee . So you do what I say, an’ I’m tellin’ you: Muck stalls.”
    “No.”
    His face suffused with the color of crushed pomegranates, and for a moment I thought he’d tuck his great chin to his chest and charge at me, bearlike. But instead, he shuddered, glanced again at the sky, and gurgled, “We’ll all be whipped.”
    He turned and lumbered back to the young boys mucking stalls.
    “Faster!” he bellowed at them, snatching a pitchfork from a flaxen stack of clean bedding chaff. “You’re too slow; work faster!”
    At his cry, a flock of roosting pigeons burst into flight. The carrion bird, perched upon the wall, shook her feathers at me and cackled angrily.
    I picked up the shovel and set to work building my