Read Trinity Rising: Book Two of the Wild Hunt (Wild Hunt Trilogy 2) for Free Online Page A

I told you yesterday: do your duty and all will be well. Now wash your face, put on the dress I gave you and attend the chief. He will be expecting to see you beside him when he wakes.’ With that, Ytha gathered her mantle around her and strode off.
    Teia stared after her through a blur of tears. Maybe the wedding fair would have been a better option after all.

4
    SAVIN

    The house near the tailors’ guildhall in Mesarild to which Savin had tracked Alderan’s colours truly was unremarkable: a foursquare, sturdy thing of dressed Elethrainian granite, stolid and rosy as a country squire, surrounded by a low wall built more to define the small square of neatly scythed lawn behind which the house sat than for any pretensions to security. To all appearances it was a merchant’s residence; someone well-to-do enough to afford a modest garden in the imperial capital, where all the streets sloped steeply away from the Citadel and level ground was at a premium. It was not ostentatious, but possessed of that smug well-keptness that was so dreadfully middle class.
    Watching from the shadows of the guildhall’s great arched door, Savin wondered what had motivated Alderan to come here. Visiting a friend would be the obvious answer, but Alderan’s friends tended to be innkeepers and ships’ captains and such – lower sorts who picked up gossip or moved freely around the Empire and could therefore be useful to him. A lace-merchant or mill owner of the type suggested by this house was an unusual choice for the old man.
    Another mystery. Another puzzle to be solved.
    Light glimmered behind the drapes covering one of the downstairs windows but the upper storey was dark. So the family was at home – at this hour, probably at supper. Good; they’d all be in one place. That would make things easier.
    He was about to step out of the shadows and cross the street when the front door opened and a woman appeared, carrying a brass lamp. A housemaid, by her sober gown and white apron. She hung the guest-lamp on a hook by the door to light the way for visitors, then vanished back inside. The door closed behind her with a solid thud.
    Savin frowned. How many other servants would there be, for a house that size? A parlour maid and cook, perhaps a housekeeper? Carefully, he reached out with his mind towards the house. Five tight knots of colour clustered in the room with the light behind the drapes, and at the back of the property there was a further dull smear that was most likely the maid, probably in the kitchen or scullery. A scan of the other rooms said they were empty; maybe the householder was not quite as wealthy as he pretended to be.
    Something dragged over his senses, as fine and clinging as a cobweb in a darkened room. It was a ward of some kind, one as subtly engineered as any he had ever encountered outside of the Western Isles, and it bound up the entire house – mouse-holes to chimneypots – so delicately that the least touch would tear it.
    Impressive.
    Savin looked again at the colours he’d found, studying them. Three were children, their nascent gifts as carefree and tangled as a patch of wild flowers, but the other two, now that he looked more closely, were carefully modulated to appear almost nothing at all. The discipline required to conceal a gift so effectively took years of practice.
    He almost laughed. Now Alderan’s visit made sense, and the weaving he had detected had most likely been him opening a way through the ward. Which meant – oh, and the realisation filled him with such glee – that this self-satisfied little mansion was probably the Order of the Veil’s safe house in the capital.
    So. Kitchen first to deal with the maid, then, once there was no chance he’d be disturbed, he’d see what the others could tell him about the old man.
    Under his senses the Veil was a rippling many-coloured fabric, billowing like a goodwife’s laundry line. Holding up his hands, palms out, fingers spread, he stilled it,