Read The Riven Shield: The Sun Sword #5 for Free Online

will let you.” Her face was pale. “I know that I’m sending you to the wolves, boy—but learn to be a wolf. It’s all you have now.”
    As if she knew. As if she knew his crime.
    He mounted the horse awkwardly, and she paled. “Devlin—you
do
know how to ride, don’t you?”
    “Some,” he answered curtly, because it was the truth. But it wasn’t much of a truth; he’d ridden rarely, and more often in wagon and cart than on horseback. He turned the horse around. Turned it back.
    And then he glanced over his shoulder to say something, to offer this stranger thanks.
    She was looking at her hand—at the rings on her hand—with some curiosity. There were four; she touched them, one at a time, and then when she came to the last, a ruby of red fire and brilliance even at the distance that separated them, she pulled it hard. It did not budge. He might have offered to help, but he knew her now as sorcerer, and he wasn’t a fool.
    Just a coward.
    “In time,” she said, although he didn’t understand why. “It is not yet your time.” Before he could speak, she lifted a hand. “Never thank me, Devlin. It is . . . hard on me.” She smiled; it was a bleak expression, a bitter one. He might have spoken in spite of her request, but she took a step forward, and there was suddenly no one to speak
to
.
    The horse shuddered once, and Devlin began to ease it into a walk.
    But he did not go east, not yet; he went west. To face the truth, and to face himself.
    The lake, in the summer day, was alive with the glitter of dragonfly wings, the buzz of insects, the flight of birds large and small. As he approached, he could see the flat, torn square that had once been the tent that he and Anya had shared. Beside it, like so much refuse, the bedroll she’d been torn out of; it was whole.
    He saw ash in the sandy pit they’d made for their fire, saw the black soot of burned wood against stone. His hands were heavy on the reins, his breath tight. Minutes passed; the sun rested upon dark hair, heating it, as if in judgment. The horse—the unnamed, too fine horse—was restive beneath him, almost anxious, as if he, too, knew what had been done here. Devlin urged him forward, and the horse went. Barely.
    If he owned the horse, truly, Devlin thought, sliding out of the saddle, the horse was going to have to understand who was master, and who mount. But not now. Not now.
    He took a deep breath and began to search the grass. For her. The blade saw its first use, against tall stalks of green-gray; white tufts flew in the wayward breeze as he cut loose pods of milkweed. Here and there, birds flew up, chattering in fear or frustration, brown wings spread to catch the wind, to use it. They were, all these things, clouds that he moved through.
    He had to find her body.
    We have little time, and you must be away.
    His search grew more frantic as the sun rose. He had left her to die—but he could not leave her to rot. The Mother’s arms had not yet been opened to receive this most precious of her daughters, and he would do this last thing for her because he had failed in every other way.
    But search as he might, this last act of penitence was to be denied him. The grass yielded nothing.
    He was a coward, he thought bitterly, to the end, because he mounted the horse that the stranger had left him instead of pursuing his search into the lake, and the woods surrounding it, as if the search itself were all that mattered.
    No.
    He still wanted
life.
Had he ever told her that his life had no meaning without her? He wondered, and it hurt him.
    This, then, was the burden he carried with him from these lands that no man owned: A death and a life.
    And he would ride to war, carrying such a burden, and he would ride from war, carrying it, and earn his rank, and accept his decorations, all the while carrying it so naturally and so completely that none but he might be aware of its nature.
    They might call him brave, who couldn’t see how much he had