Read The Magician of Hoad for Free Online Page A

beside him sucked in, then billowed out again, as if the very weave of the canvas were breathing. Dysart’s careful pile of papers swarmed up into the air around his head. He grimaced and made an odd barking noise at nothing, while the papers drifted down around him.

SONS WITHOUT A FATHER
    In the next few days Linnet studied the endless history of Hoad, but she was also part of ceremonial entertainments, standing beside her father, feeling his strong hand holding hers as the clowns and fools of Diamond performed their dances, or catching her breath as teams of campaigners, led by the warriors known as Dragons of Hoad, clashed with one another in mock battles. Linnet cheered for Luce, who rode with the Dragons, and hoped he noticed her out of the corner of his eye as she urged him on.
    They were living in a city so mixed that Linnet might see, all within a few yards, ladies sitting in chairs of gilded leather or working men with heavy yokes over their shoulders carrying lavatory cans and buckets of kitchen refuse out beyond the boundary of Tent City. Linnet learned to tell the campaigners of County Glass in their green jackets from those of County Doro, who wore long leather coats with the fur turned in, and to recognize all the banners along with the Lords they represented… the seven Lordsof the seven counties of Hoad: Argo, Dante, Glass, Isman, Doro, Bay, and her own county, ambivalent Hagen.
    From the edge of the camp she could stare curiously across the battered plain to the other city… the camp of the Dannorad. The King and his older sons passed like mirages of gold and silver between the two cities, for in a great pavilion between the camps, men of both Hoad and the Dannorad, maps spread between them, were working in and out through the natural lace of valleys and spurs that knitted the lands together. As the victorious one, the King of Hoad could have demanded everything, but Lila declared (just as if she knew all the secrets of the golden pavilions), that the King wanted a peace that would
hold
— something stronger than the frail truces of the last two hundred years—and was prepared to be generous to former enemies, for generosity seemed as if it might forge a true reconciliation.
    In the evening the two tent cities entertained each other with banquets and parties given by firelight, the King’s parties being the grandest of all, and there the Dukes of the Dannorad and the Lords of Hoad sat together, talking and laughing as if they had not spent so much of their recent history trying to kill one another. Out from the shadows came clowns on stilts, jugglers, acrobats, fools, freaks, and fireeaters. One of the King’s bodyguards always stood behind him, ready to taste the King’s wine or to guard his back.
    “That’s an Assassin,” whispered Lila dramatically.
    Linnet had heard of the Assassins, even in Hagen. They were the bogeymen of Hoad, faces masked in white paint like the faces of dangerous clowns. It was said they neverdied, that their heads held no brains, only a space in which a King might lodge an order, and that once the King had put a name in that space, nothing could save the man to whom the name belonged.
    Prince Betony Hoad had a constant attendant of his own, Talgesi, not an Assassin but a young man of his own age who had once been his whipping boy and had taken all his beatings for him, for no nurse or tutor was allowed to beat the heir to Hoad while his mother was alive. Both Prince and servant wore the same expression. When one smiled, the other smiled. Occasionally Betony Hoad might murmur something aside to his companion, and they would look into each other’s eyes as if they were the only real people in a world of ghosts.
    Not all the fallen campaigners had been buried. The scent of their decay (the very scent that had greeted Linnet when she first rode onto the battlefield), carried in on the south wind, was part of every spectacle and public occasion. For all that, as the