Free The Dark Ferryman by Jenna Rhodes

left him to search for his father when his prolonged childhood had so burdened her that she had no choice but to abandon him. She said she’d return, but she never did, nor did anyone who might have deemed himself a father come to claim him in her stead. He was not wanted, except by himself. Every road had been a choice for him, a conscious decision to survive or fall by the wayside. He took care to move from village to city to town, leaving when the years made it obvious that others matured while he did not. He had a talent for making things listen to him and bend to his will. He used that to calm the recalcitrant beasts of trader stables and caravans as a stableboy, a menial job that gave him coin to get through from time to time. Other seasons, he made a living through salvaging and stealing that which was not held dear or close by others. He learned to fight to protect himself and he taught himself to throw daggers . . . to amuse himself and to hunt. He hadn’t had much of a life until that day that Gilgarran fell on him from a second-story window and looked into his face and knew exactly what he looked at despite how Sevryn tried to dissemble and to persuade him otherwise with his Voice.
    Gilgarran had taken him in, groomed him, taught him intrigue and spying and weapons and diplomacy, and the two of them had never looked back until the day Quendius sliced Gilgarran’s head from his shoulders when Gilgarran breached his outlaw fortress and forge. Of his own almost twenty-year captivity by the weaponsmith, he thought and remembered little except that which sometimes rode his dreams. The memories had been scarred over and hidden for a good many years till made raw again by circumstances, but he would not dwell on them. They were as if they had happened to someone else, and so he treated them that way. To think otherwise would invite insanity or self-pity, and he’d already moved beyond that. Far beyond. His escape had brought him to yet another Vaelinar who’d recognized the potential in him: Queen Lariel and her brother Jeredon, and he had not left their service since.
    Not even for Rivergrace. He thanked the lost Gods of the Vaelinars and the stubbornly absent ones of Kerith that he’d never had to make the choice.
    Lara’s title had not come by way of a dynasty, although her grandfather had been the Warrior King. She had, through a series of trials that Sevryn and most Vaelinar were not privy to, earned her designation. He could not say what she’d sacrificed, but he could say that he found her fair and tough-minded and formidable. No word had ever been breathed of what Talent she held. There were those disgruntled Vaelinar who claimed she had no Talent, that her remarkable eyes of blue highlighted by gold and silver were empty of the magics of her people, but he would deny that. Secretive she could be, but without Talent? No. She possessed whatever she needed to be Warrior Queen of the contentious Vaelinar, and more.
    As for her brother Jeredon, he was like a brother to Sevryn as well. Tall and graceful, diffident about politics and more at home in the forest than in the halls, Jeredon strode across the lands as a hunter and care-taker, not a warrior. Since his wounding in a rockfall, he’d been paralyzed from the waist down, though healers proclaimed he retained some feeling and movement and that he would likely heal completely, given time, that nerves and tendons and cartilage had not been severed, only severely bruised and traumatized. The one trait he shared with his sister, impatience, made his recovery all the more difficult. Lariel did not need the burden of his infirmity. No one but Jeredon complained of it. Indeed, Rivergrace’s foster sister Nutmeg waited on him hand and foot and said not a word in complaint. The sturdy Dweller lass had pulled a starveling Vaelinar child from the River Silverwing and made a sister of her, and she’d accept no less a miracle with Jeredon’s recuperation.
    Sevryn