The Other Lands Read Online Free Page A

a shape blocked the sky. The soldier yanked Ravi upward, spinning him in the air, then drove him face-first into the sand. He pressed his knee into Ravi’s back, the full weight ofhim. Ravi’s mouth formed an oval as the air inside him escaped. He gasped for more, but the man pressed him like he wanted to drive his knee through him into the ground.
    “What to do with him?” he asked.
    “End him,” another of the soldiers answered, his voice calm. “It’s a waste, but we’ll still have her. The numbers will be right anyway.”
    Ravi, his head to the side on the damp sand, his lungs pressed flat, and his eyes rimmed with tears, watched a knife cut into view. And past it, he saw his sister, watching him, her face heartbreaking, desolate. A soldier had her by the shoulder, though it was clear there was no fight in her. Ravi wanted to tell her not to look, but he could not. And he did not have to. Something else caught her attention, someone whom Ravi could not see but whom she stared at with no lessening of her distress.
    “Wait,” another voice called. Ravi did not know whose it was, but the voice carried authority. It was a strange voice, inflected with sharp edges even though the speaker was unhurried.
    The blade hung above him, waiting.
    “He’s got the spirit that eats death in him,” the voice said. The speaker paused for a few moments. “He’s got life in greater measure than most. I see another use for him. I think the Auldek will like this one.”



C HAPTER
O NE
    W hen the Balbara lookout shouted the alarm, Princess Mena Akaran was up from her campstool in an instant. She broke from the circle where she had been sitting with her officers and climbed the ridge at a run. She drew close to the sharp-eyed young man, sighting down his slim, brown arm and out from his pointing finger across the arid expanse that was central Talay. It took her a moment to see what he did. Even then, it was neither the creature itself she saw nor the party who hunted it. They were too far away. What marked their progress were the billows of smoke from the torches the runners carried—that and a yellow smudge at the rim of the world that must have been dust kicked up by their feet. They seemed to be as far off as the horizon, but the princess knew they would close that distance quickly.
    She half slid down the sandy slope and regrouped with her officers. One captain, Melio Sharratt, she assigned to the farthest southern beacon; to the other, Kelis of Umae, went the northern beacon. They already knew what to do, she told them. It was only a matter of seeing it accomplished, timing it perfectly, and having luck on their side. She left it to them to get the others in position and remind them of their instructions, but before she dismissed them she urged them both to act with caution.
    “Do you hear me?” she asked, leaning close to the small group. She took Melio by the wrist to remind him of this but did not look in his face. She knew his grin would hold constant, dismissive of the danger moving across the plain toward them. He may have become the head of the Elite, but the role had done nothing to alter him. His longish hair would be cast casually across an eye, often swept aside only to fall in place again. They had wed five years earlier. She had never hidden her love of him from others, butneither did she let it distract her at moments like this. She spoke as if her words were meant for all the hunting party, as, in truth, they were.
    “I want nobody dead. Only the foulthing dies today,” she said.
    “Those words coming from you?” Melio asked. “Will you abide by them yourself, or will this be like last time, with that—”
    Mena spoke as if she had not heard him. “Nobody else. That order falls on each of you personally. We’ve lost too many already.”
    Her eyes settled on Kelis. The Talayan’s gaze was as calm as ever, his skin dark and smooth, his eyes slow moving. It was a face she had grown to deeply care