Antiphon Read Online Free

rear gate of the manor. The younger of the two men opened the gate for her and she passed through. She followed the trail until the forest swallowed her; then she broke into a gentle run and left the path, letting the wet ferns slap at her as she built speed.
    She wore loose trousers and a looser shirt for these excursions, trading her low, sturdy boots for a pair of doeskin moccasins that protected her feet without encumbering them. And of course, she wore the knives Rudolfo had given her for their wedding—blades she’d already helpedherself to and had even wetted in battle in the days of violence that had culminated in the blood magick that spared her son.
    Like the manor, the forest also came to life around her. Birdsong echoed beneath a dark canopy, and foliage shuddered and whispered with the movement of wildlife slipping back into dens to sleep out the day. Mist clung to the ground, lending the wooded terrain an ominous beauty. She ran through it, leaving the familiar path in favor of making her own.
    She built speed until she felt the sweat trickling down the sides of her breasts, until she tasted iron in the back of her mouth, until her breathing deepened with effort. Then, she held that pace.
    As she ran, she thought about the day ahead of her.
    First, she would see to Jakob. And after feeding him, she’d dress him and take him to see the other children. Isaak had tasked one of the mechoservitors with basic education and childcare, drawing on theories from the vast tomes of Franci thought they now re-created for the new library. They had built a school for the children at the base of the hill where that massive structure slowly took shape. She’d wanted to bring them into the Seventh Forest Manor, but there had simply been too many of them; in the end, her father had suggested that this would be more in their best interest.
    Memories of the nightmare tugged at her and she increased her speed slightly, as if the extra effort might exorcise the iron knives and the children’s screams from her nightmares.
    Y’Zirite monsters
. It still closed her throat to think about it. Somewhere southeast of them, in the Ghosting Crests, her father worked with a small remnant of their family to learn what he could about the Blood Temple that had so recently cut most of House Li Tam out of the world.
    To save my son, she realized, by making from the blood of others a magick so powerful it could raise the dead, or cure the deathly ill.
    She felt the heat of her shame and transmuted it into anger, forcing her legs to bear her rage, savoring the slap of the foliage across her skin as she ran.
    I am the forty-second daughter of Vlad Li Tam
, she thought as she ran.
I am the queen of the Ninefold Forest Houses.
    But another voice whispered inside of her—the voice of that so-called Machtvolk queen, Winteria the Elder—calling her by a title she still did not fully comprehend:
You are the Great Mother.
    She felt the woman’s feet again within her grasping hands, saw thewoman standing above her blurred by tears of terror and hope as she begged for her son’s life. She heard again Rudolfo’s cry of surprise and saw him, too, also trapped behind her curtain of tears, standing in the doorway of the massive tent in the last of winter, upon Windwir’s blasted plain.
    She turned east and pushed harder, but the run could not strip away the image of her scarred and broken father and the compound of scarred and broken children, cut with the mark of House Y’Zir over their hearts.
    As she ran, the forest took on a gloomy silence that weighed heavy on her. But just as she noted the silence, a sound that did not belong there reached her ears.
    It was the slightest high-pitched whine, so slight that it tickled her ears, barely discernible over the sound of her pounding heart and feet. Then, another sound—the guttural cry of a bird of prey, the muffled flapping of its wings.
    By instinct, she turned toward the noise and slowed. Her right