Sorcery Rising Read Online Free Page A

twin brother, Fent, beside her. His long red fringe was plastered to his face; the rest he had bound up with thongs to stop it whipping into his eyes.
    ‘Listen to this, small sister,’ he said teasingly, bracing himself against the gunwale with a knee, ‘and tell me what you think.’ He pulled from his tunic a length of twine that had been knotted at intervals in the complicated Eyran fashion that served both as memory aid and language. Moving his fingers nimbly up and down the knots he began to declaim:
    ‘From Northern Sea to Golden Sea
    Smoothly swam the swan-necked ship
    On the backs of Sur’s white horses
    On the line of the lord’s Moon-path
    Easily from the Eyran Isles
    Came Rockfallers to the Moonfell Plain.’
    He wrapped the twine around his hand and into a loop and folded it carefully back into his tunic before looking to his twin for approval.
    ‘You repeated “moon”,’ Katla said with a grin, and watched Fent’s brows knot in consternation. ‘And I’m not sure about “Rockfallers”, either.’
    ‘I couldn’t fit “the Rockfall clan” in,’ Fent said crossly. ‘It wouldn’t scan.’
    ‘I’d stick to swordplay, if I were you, brother. Leave the song-making to Erno.’ Their cousin, Erno Hamson, for all his skill at weapons, was at heart a quiet and serious young man, and he was currently conveniently out of earshot.
    ‘As if you’d know a well-made verse from your ar— Ow! What?’ Her fingers were suddenly tight about his biceps, digging into his skin even through the sturdy leather of his jerkin.
    ‘Land: I can feel it.’
    Fent stared at her, his pale eyes mocking. ‘You can
feel
land?’
    Katla nodded. ‘There’s rock ahead. My fingers are tingling.’
    Fent laughed. ‘I swear you are a troll’s get, sister. What is it with you and rock? If you’re not climbing it, you’re divining it from the depths of the whale’s path! We’re miles north of Istria yet: Father reckoned on landfall at first light.’
    But Katla was shrouding her eyes with her hand, gazing intently at where a dark smear lay between sea and sky on the horizon. ‘There—’
    ‘A cloud.’
    ‘I’m sure it’s not . . .’
    There were clouds aplenty, piled up above the horizon in great lumps and towers, strewn about the upper reaches of the sky, which was darkening already and streaked with red, the sun having lost its daily battle with encroaching night: a blood-sky, as Erno would term it.
    A shrill cry broke into their reverie. Above them, suddenly, a white bird veered past the ship, banking sharply. Fent watched it go, his mouth a round ‘o’ of surprise. ‘A gull,’ he said, like a simple child. ‘That was a shore gull.’
    Katla squeezed his arm. ‘See?’
    And now the outline on the horizon was becoming clearer by the minute; not a cloud-bank, after all, but solid land – a long, dark plateau, bordered to the west by higher land misting away into the distance.
    ‘The Moonfell Plain.’
    She could hear the delight in her father’s voice without even having to see his face; even so, she turned around at once, eyes alight with excitement, seeking his attention. ‘Land, Father: I saw it first.’
    ‘And sensed it before that,’ Fent muttered, clearly put out.
    Aran Aranson grinned, revealing sharp white teeth amid weather-darkened skin and a close black beard barely touched by grey.
    Ahead of them, the dark shape began to resolve itself further so that tiny dots of colour against the stark black gradually revealed themselves to be brightly-hued pavilions, the more vivid pinpricks of light between them as campfires. As they sailed into the sound they could see a whole host of other vessels bobbing quietly at anchor off the shore. ‘Istria: can’t you smell it? That’s the smell of a foreign land, Katla; that’s the smell of the Southern Empire.’
    All Katla could smell was salt and sea and the sweat of bodies that had lived for a half-month in close quarters without fresh water to spare