Read The Gathandrian Trilogy 02 - Hallsfoots Battle for Free Online

but knew if she did that once she’d never be able to let go. He was her overseer in the Sub-Council of Meditation. It would— or should—be unthinkable.
    As if he’d caught the echo of her mind, though gods and stars forbid, surely he had not, he sprang to his feet and paced towards the window before turning.
    “ I’m sorry,” he said, staring briefly at her before dropping his gaze again. “I should have been here. I…I have not been.”
    It wasn’t a great apology, though she hadn’t thought they’d needed one. The normal rules surely did not apply now. Annyeke suddenly realised that the steady blue of his aura had become streaked with jagged green and a deep abiding red, the colours of jealousy and shame. She swallowed. Was she drawing those feelings out of him? Because of the responsibility the Elders had left to her? He had no reason for it; she would give the herbs and trees from the parkland itself for the burden of this duty not to be her own, but his. But what was done had been witnessed by many. Impossible to change it now. Johan looked as if he might say something else, but the scribe got there first.
    “Well,” Simon murmured. “We may not be the most obvious of conspirators but at least we’re all here.”
    “Conspirators?” Annyeke raised both eyebrows.
    “Yes. Shouldn’t we be planning something to defend Gathandria against the mind-executioner’s next assault? Your elders were convinced that the Battle of the Western Shore was not an end to it.”
    The Battle of the Western Shore , Annyeke thought. That was already what the people were calling it. It made it sound more formal than it had been. She remembered it more as a desperate skirmish and an unlikely victory than a battle. She waited for Johan to speak but, with a slight smile, he gestured at her to take the floor.
    She rose from the table where she’d been sitting and frowned at the two men, wondering what, in the name of the stars above, her words might be and how the three of them could possibly begin. Then it came to her.
    “ I’ve been looking through the old texts,” she said. “While you’ve both been…resting, and I think they might be the key to what we do next.”
    Annyeke was surprised she had managed to vocalise her thoughts at all, much less that they sounded reasonable. The fact that Johan was sitting in her kitchen area continued to make her feel as if a shock of ice-cold water was drenching her, over and over again. From the instinct for personal preservation, she assessed her personal mind-wall but found nothing untoward there and, besides, Johan still hadn’t seemed to notice anything, which was something she should be accustomed to. Damn him to the far reaches of the Gathandrian empire. Knowing how she felt about Johan didn’t make it easier to bear. Nor did the realisation that the scribe had, in a way beyond her imaginings, guessed her secret make her life any less difficult. How had he done that? His mind-skills weren’t greater than hers, mind-cane or no mind-cane.
    “What old texts?” This from Simon. He had no real knowledge of Gathandria beyond the little Johan must have told him. She could sense the lack of her country’s history in his head. And books and writing were, of course, central to the scribe’s heart.
    “ They’re the legends of our country,” she explained. “Stories written down over the generations, before even our telling, and which have been kept in the Great Library of Gathandria for as long as the tales themselves have existed. Much of the Library was destroyed during the wars with Gelahn, but the most precious of the books were kept underground in a cellar only the elders knew of, until I found it. There were other far more terrible things going on in that cellar, too, but that’s not for the telling now. The fact is, I brought some of the most important texts home, not long before the two of you returned to us, and I’ve been reading them. They talk about many