Free The Wanderer by Cherry; Wilder, Katya Reimann Page B

Eastmark, whose ancestors had come from the Burnt Lands.
    In the south there were the wharves and warehouses: the city of Pfolben lay on the River Elnor, which went winding through the Southland to the tideless waters, the Sea of Ara. Maurik, the Lord of Pfolben, ruler of the Southland, was very rich. He had increased his great inheritance by trading with the people of the Burnt Lands and with the Zebbecks, a race of mariners who sailed in the Sea of Ara.
    Yet some said that his greatest treasure was his good wife, Lady Annhad of Andine, eldest daughter of the ill-fated Strett of Cloudhill. As a young man, Maurik had ridden out with his father, the old lord, during the Great King’s War, his elder brother having died in that ill-fated adventure of the Great King at the Adderneck Pass. Maurik brought home his bride from the Eastern Rift, plundered by the army of the Southland in the months following the great betrayal of Silverlode.
    Lady Annhad, who had come to love her lord, had borne him three children. Her two daughters were fine girls, well married now to southern lords. Blayn, the only son, her youngest child, had been a sickly infant, not expected to live. He was cosseted as a boy because he was frail, high strung, a changeling among
the big-boned sons of the southern lords. This was all the explanation his mother could find for the way he had turned out. Now, at two-and-twenty, Blayn was adroit, charming, well beloved, and it mattered little that he was a head shorter than his companions.
    Lord Maurik favored a rich simplicity in dress and in the food that overflowed his palace’s kitchens. All must be open handed and aboveboard in his domain. Intrigue, magic … these things belonged to the Burnt Lands.
    Pfolben palace itself seemed almost to mock this attitude. Its older courts and colonnades had been built ages past, before the coming of the men of Mel’Nir, by princes from the Burnt Lands, from Ferss and Aghiras and Reshem-al-Djain. They had long been driven back over the Sea of Ara, but their ghosts remained. Who had not heard a whisper of silken robes on summer evenings, a sound of women murmuring in the walled garden? On the night of the full moon there was an inexplicable stench of blood in the stableyard.
    Lady Annhad could only fret at her good lord’s blindness in certain things. He saw no ghosts. He was genial and trusting in his dealings with all men. At the same time he flaunted his own honesty like a banner and had no patience with human frailty. He swore that his son, Blayn, was like himself, honest as the day and a true man of Mel’Nir.
    So Lady Annhad was not displeased when she saw her son had acquired a big honest kedran as his henchwoman. Indeed, she would have preferred him to go about with Gael and others like her as a permanent bodyguard. The Lord Blayn had need of protection: a towering shadow fell upon him one night as he walked along Orange Flower Street to some tryst. There was a flash of metal, a cry, a splash; folk came running with torches.
    Ensign Maddoc had tumbled the assassin into the river and it was the young Lord Keythril, released from prison. He was dragged from the water, half drowned. Blayn smiled and pressed no charges. The next year there was another incident of this kind involving two Danasken blades, hired by an older lord, the husband of a beautiful young wife.
    Blayn, warned by his sword, Ishkar, and stoutly supported by Gael Maddoc, made short work of these men. This night was lit
by the full moon: afterward the stench of death filled the little fountain court where the attack had taken place, beyond what the blood of two men could have brought there. The young lord, half-gagging, insisted that the dead be left where they had fallen. He washed at the fountain and hurried on, shadowed by his faithful kedran, to the shelter of the palace, where his brother officers were waiting to dine.
    Wind of this affair came to the ears of Lady Annhad, and she sent a messenger to