Free Cold Hearted Son of a Witch (Dragoneers Saga) by M. R. Mathias Page B

like a village than the reclusive place of worship Jenka always imagined it to be. There was an odd dullness to a few of the laborers. Jenka couldn’t put his thumb on it, but to him they seemed dazed. Until Jenka got a closer look, the temple itself didn’t seem like much other than a well-decorated rectangle with towers at its corners. Once he saw how the puzzled pieces of stone fit together he felt insignificant, as if he were alone on the open sea. Something so amazingly intricate was baffling to him.
    The hierarchy of the Order was portrayed by the color of the robes the druids wore. Brown was obviously low on the pole, and black not much higher. Jenka saw a white-robed boy whose tattooed face looked almost exactly like Zahrellion’s. He saw serious men wearing light blue robes too, but when he saw the druid in the blood-red robe trimmed in silver, he was confounded completely.
    The man strolling out of the temple with his hands clasped behind his back looked exactly like Linux, so much so that Jenka decided they had to be twins. When the man was introduced as the High Druidon, Lanxe, Jenka decided he was correct. Lanxe’s facial tattoos were exactly the same as Linux’s. Lanxe spoke to Lemmy mentally and had no problem pushing Jenka out of the conversation. Soon the High Druidon was walking away and Jenka was following Lemmy in another direction.
    We’ll refresh ourselves. After that Unisyus will show us around the grounds while the acolytes are cleared out of the librarium, Lemmy explained. Once that is done the libriars will be at our service .
    Jenka was shown to a room with a large tub of water in it. There was a tray of cheese and fruit on a table, and a set of clean gray robes trimmed in red. The ebon-skinned, blue-robed man who led him there reached down and spoke a few unpronounceable words while stirring his finger. Within the span of a few heartbeats the water in the tub was steaming. The druid rose, took a vial from a shelf and dropped a dollop of oily blue liquid into the bath. Soon a rich, earthy smell, like a hardwood forest in full spring, filled Jenka’s nostrils. Then the man made an offering gesture toward the tray of food and bowed his way out of the room.
    After his bath, Jenka ate most of the fruit and all of the cheese. He found a different druid, this one a young man in brown robes, waiting at his door. He was led outside through a fragrant garden of pastel peach-colored blooms to a gazebo where Lemmy and a tall man in a blue robe trimmed in gold sat before a trickling water feature.
    This is Unisyus, Lemmy said in the ethereal. Unis, Jenka De Swasso, one of the Royal Dragoneers.
    I’m not that royal , Jenka jested as he exchanged head bows with Unisyus. But I am a Dragoneer.
    The bald, long-bearded man was old. The triangle tattooed on his forehead was colored somewhere between blond-stained wood and brilliant gold, depending on the light. He seemed irritated about something, but did a good job of keeping his frustration in check. He started telling them about the construction of the main temple as if he were reciting a lecture. It was made of intricately-carved granite blocks that fitted together in ways that seemed impossible.   “...they Dou-crafted each and every stone,” he was saying. “We used ogres to fit them, of course. The ogres are the reason we can exist up here in this deep, isolated valley without being overrun by the trellkin. The ogres love smokeberry wine.” He gave a conspiratorial wink. “We make the best of it. Our only competition is the Outlanders. Even at the height of Gravelbone’s uprising we were relatively safe here. It was a group of our Order’s gatherers that were cut off from us by the hordes that came to you. We were glad to learn they made it to Kingsmen’s Keep and then Mainsted.”
    “Ogres couldn’t have topped those spires,” Jenka said, trying to conceive a way for anyone to put the hammered copper sheets up on the top of the steep