Read The Brush of Black Wings for Free Online Page B

of
the bookcases. Unlike hers, his hands were warm. Candlelight
flickered across his stern face. Winter had paled his burnished
skin to the color of honey, making his eyes even blacker than
usual. He lifted her chilly fingers to his mouth and
blew.
    She sighed her thanks as his breath cascaded
over her knuckles, thawing them so they didn’t ache so much from
the cold. “If you keep doing that, I might actually be in danger of
falling in love with you,” she teased.
    One black eyebrow arched, and Silhara paused.
“Such declarations will earn you no additional favors from me,
apprentice.” He bit the tip of her index finger gently, smiling
when she pinched him with her other hand. “Nor will your abuse.”
His lips caressed her palm, and he released her hand. “I leave you
to the books. I’ve found two spells that should destroy the temple
and any artifact buried beneath it. I’ll test them in the bailey.
If they don’t work or your Gift makes them work too well, then the
most that will happen is I accidently roast that goat Gurn swears
is eating the bed sheets off the wash line. Then we’ll just have
goat every meal for the next week.”
    Alone once more in the library, she returned
to her work. Gurn interrupted her once, bearing a pot of tea. She
nodded her thanks and returned to perusing a set of fragile scrolls
whose edges crumbled under her touch.
    They burned her fingers, their surfaces dusted
with the remnants of a sorcery different but as dark as that which
flowed briefly from the temple ruin. Silhara had pilfered these
from Iwhevenn Keep, home to a lich. While the words written on the
parchment were merely a historical recounting, the parchment itself
bore the mark of necromancy. Martise continuously wiped her hands
on her skirts and would have abandoned the scrolls were they not
the ones containing the information she searched for in Silhara’s
vast library.
    She read through them as quickly as possible,
lips moving in soundless dictation even as her heart set a
galloping pace. “Not just a demon,” she whispered to herself when
she reached one scroll’s end. “A king of demons.”
    Her memory was exceptional, bordering on
wondrous—a useful tool for the master who once owned her. Martise
possessed the ability to repeat everything she read to Silhara in
exact detail. But what she just read rattled her so badly she’d
likely stutter incoherently when she told him her news. She took up
her quill with a shaking hand, paused for a steadying breath, and
continued with her notes.
    The sun arced toward the west with the moon on
its hem and then its shoulders. The ink ran dry in the well, and
Martise’s hand cramped around her fifth quill as she scribbled into
the evening. She stopped to rub eyes gritty with
exhaustion.
    Her folded arms made a handy pillow on the
hard table, and she rested her head on them. She’d stop for a
moment, give her hand and her eyes a rest and then write more. By
the time Gurn called her down for supper, she’d be finished and
could pass her notes to Silhara for perusal while she indulged in a
bracing dram of Peleta’s Fire.
    Sleep came hard and fast. Rest did not. She
dreamed vivid dreams populated with images grotesque and
unfamiliar—skeletal horses made of smoke and fire and men who were
not men armored in black and wearing helmets whose face shields
bore the visages of the tortured and the damned. They carried
swords with blades that shimmered hot blue, as if the swordsmith
who made them captured lightning bolts in a crucible and forged
them into the molten steel.
    “ The king is the sword; the sword
is the king,” she murmured.
    Her dreams changed, drifting from demonic
warriors on inferno-eyed horses to a vast and writhing darkness
that cavorted and shrieked and withered all it embraced. Not just
death, but Death gone mad.
    “ Martise.”
    She erupted from sleep with a scream piercing
enough to shatter the windows. Her skirts hobbled her as she
recoiled from the light