The Prodigal Mage: Fisherman’s Children Book One

Read The Prodigal Mage: Fisherman’s Children Book One for Free Online Page B

Book: Read The Prodigal Mage: Fisherman’s Children Book One for Free Online
Authors: Karen Miller
Tags: FIC009020
scarcely recognised recited the raincalling incantation. Watched the sigils burst into fiery life. Saw blue flames dance up and down his arms. Felt magic’s wind rise, gently at first, then stronger, and stronger still, till it buffeted him like stormbreath racing inland over the open sea. His blood bubbled with a power that remembered the ocean. He couldn’t have stopped even if he’d wanted to.
    Barl save him. He didn’t want to.
    The air above the map begin to thicken. Darken. The power he’d raised gave tongue in rumbling thunder and tearing cracks of lightning. He was hot and cold all at once. Shaking and utterly still. His body tingled, like the kissing of a hundred pretty girls. His hair spat sparks, and his fingers, and all the world shimmered bright and blue.
    Then the rain burst forth… and the world washed blue to red in a heartbeat as his blood exploded through the confines of his flesh, poured burning from his eyes, his nose, his mouth. And everywhere he turned there was pain.
    Shouting, heart banging his ribs, Asher staggered back from the map. There was sweat on his face, running hot down his spine. He touched his nose, his eyes, then stared at his fingertips, expecting to see them daubed with blood.
    They were clean.
    Blotting his forehead on his woollen sleeve, he paced around the room, carefully not looking at Barl’s ruined map. Slowly, too slowly, the woken pains in his body slunk away to hide. His breathing eased. The vivid, wrenching memory receded.
    All done now. All done. I ain’t livin’ that madness any more.
    “Sink me,” he muttered, listening to the uneven thud of his boot heels on the scratched parquetry floor. “Don’t do that again, y’gawpin’ great fool.”
    His voice sounded shocked and ragged, breaking the silence. And then he heard swift footsteps on the Chamber’s stone spiral staircase.
    “Asher? Are you up there? Asher!”
    Dathne
.
    She came through the open doorway and stopped short, seeing his face. “Jervale’s mercy, are you all right?”
    He could cross Barl’s bloody Mountains himself and vanish in the shadows, fall into an endless, lightless abyss, sink himself to the bottom of Westwailing Harbour—and he reckoned she’d still find him. She’d come to drag him home. She
was
home, and always would be.
    “I’m fine, Dath,” he said, halting.
Don’t tell her. No need for her to be scared. Not yet.
“I’m just—just hidin’ from Darran.”
    Dathne’s gaze was keen. “Darran and Rafe are book-buying down in the City.”
    “Ah,” he said. “Good. I’m safe a while, yet.”
    Still Dathne stared at him, skeptical. “Hmm.”
    Ten years and two spratlings later, she hadn’t changed a whit. Sometimes, caught looking at her, he thought he’d see Matt any moment, so like her younger self did she seem to his eye. The Dathne of Dorana’s Market Square, that first day, and the Dathne who frowned at him now, they were the same woman. Small and lean and lithe, dark hair long and careless, clothes careless too. An important Olken she’d become, but you’d never know it to look at her. She wore silk like tired cotton and laughed when he gave her jewels.
    “Asher…” Dathne crossed the empty space between them and rested her palms against his chest. Tilted her head back to stare up into his face. “This isn’t about Darran.”
    A strand of hair escaped from braided confinement tickled her sharp-boned cheek. He curled it round his finger and tugged, gently. “Course it is.”
    “Asher,”
she said, pinching his chin between her thumb and forefinger, “don’t treat me like a fool. No-one comes to this Weather Chamber. Not any more.”
    “You knew where to find me.”
    She smiled. When she smiled like that she near melted his bones. “Well… yes. I’m Jervale’s Heir, remember?” Lightly her fist punched above his drubbing heart. “Or used to be.” Her glorious smile faded, leaving her face and eyes sombre. Shimmering with fear. “So no more

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