Free The Three Lands Omnibus (2011 Edition) by Dusk Peterson Page A

native of Cold Run – not while our villages were feuding. I could not help but feel hurt, though, that Fenton had never revealed the secret of his correspondence to me. After all, our blood was now mixed, and our spirits had been mixed long before that.

As though guessing my thoughts, Fenton added, "Emlyn preferred that I not mention our correspondence to anyone. He embroiled himself in some trouble during his time at the priests' house – he never got along well with most of the priests there. Therefore, he has trying to live a quiet life now, hoping that people will forget his past so that he may freely make his mark on the future when the time comes."

"What sort of work does he do?" I asked as I scrambled my way up to the mountaintop, and then waited with restrained impatience as Fenton followed behind.

"He is a jeweller," replied Fenton, and smiled at my look.

A more unlikely profession for my cousin I could not have imagined. What little I remember of him is of an active boy, forever darting around our village when he came to visit – often in a secretive manner, since he and Griffith were fond of playing pranks on their elders. When he was not helping Griffith set up water-traps for men or locking indignant women in their chambers, Emlyn was most often busy ducking through the woods next to Mountside, playing Jackal and Prey. He was the best Jackal I ever knew, though he said that I was the best prey. Certainly I was the only boy who had any success in keeping hidden when he went hunting for us.

If I had thought about it, I would have imagined Emlyn as a soldier or a dagger-thrower or at the very least a fisherman. The idea of Emlyn being content to spend his life sitting on a bench, poring over bits of gold and emerald, was sorely disappointing.

"He's not an ordinary jeweller," Fenton said loyally; he always seeks to see the best, even in men who have wasted their lives. "He sells his own work rather than depend on traders to do so – that allows him to travel a great deal. And his way of looking at precious metal and stones . . . He sees into the heart of them. I remember standing in the work chamber of the priests' house when Emlyn was a boy, watching him craft a neck-chain for a noblewoman. He told me – as though he were my tutor rather than I his – that the Koretian people are joined together by their love of the gods, like the links of a precious chain."

I puzzled over this image as we walked across the scrubby grass that shivered continuously from the wind from the black border mountains. "Joined together in what way?" I asked finally.

"I mused on that thought for many a day afterwards," Fenton responded. "I finally came to realize that what binds all of us together is our belief that we must make sacrifice to the gods. If I truly love the gods and their law, I will know when the right moment comes to offer up my sacrifice. That is true of all of us who love the gods."

I raised my eyes from our path and felt a shiver shudder over me as though I were grass, for as chance would take it, at that moment we were passing the spot of my earliest memory.

Although I was only five at the time, I could still remember that day: hearing Emlyn give one of his lilting cries, like a wild animal, and then arriving at the mountaintop to see my cousin standing over the body of a dead man. At the time, being young and filled with stories of the gods, I had imagined that the Jackal would appear at any moment to carry the man away to the Land Beyond. I was therefore eager to help Emlyn start the funeral fire so that I could meet the god.

To my disappointment, the man had been alive, though close to death.

"You offered up your sacrifice to your god long ago," I said as we turned our paths toward the mountain range north of us. "You came to Koretia when your god called you, though you nearly died on the journey."

"The god was guiding me during that journey, else I would never have survived," said Fenton as we