The Seer by Rowan McAllister (reading comprehension books .TXT) 📕

He slumped onto the bed and put his face in his hands. What was the matter with him? Daks had been gone less than two hours and he felt like he was losing his mind. The man’s scent hadn’t even had time to fade from the bedlinens.

He buried his face in those linens and breathed, trying to calm down. He was so wrapped up in inner turmoil, he missed the first tingling along his nerves. By the time he pulled his head out of his ass enough to realize what was happening, he was too late to even try to stop the Vision from barreling through him. Luckily, he was already on the bed, so he didn’t have far to fall when his world spun out of control.

Daks stood alone in a forest. The setting sun cast long shadows around him, but Ravi could just make out Daks’s face. It bore the exact same expression it had when they were together on the ferry and the flood was raging toward them—controlled terror. He held a dagger in one hand and a short sword in the other as he faced off against something hidden in the darkness. Ravi’s perspective suddenly shifted, as if he were now looking through Daks’s eyes, and what he saw made his heart stop. Peering out at him from between two trees was a pair of glowing red eyes, eyes anyone would recognize even if they’d never seen them in real life—Riftspawn!

Ravi rolled off the bed and onto the floor, gasping and fighting the last clinging tendrils of his Vision. As soon as he could get his limbs to obey him, he got to his knees and used the bed to push to his feet. He staggered out of the room and down the stairs. When he spotted Eben, he rushed the man.

“Eben! Please tell me there’s some way I can get a message to Daks.”

The big man looked at him, confused. “A message? Sorry, I don’t think so. He didn’t know where he’d end up, or at least he didn’t tell me.”

Ravi groaned. “Please. This is Samebar. Don’t you have some sort of magic you can use? There has to be something. Daks showed me the message stones.”

Eben shook his head. “They only work if you’ve got the matching stone with you. Daks wouldn’t have taken anything like that into Rassa. It’s too dangerous, if you’re caught.”

“Then I need to get across.”

“He said you should stay here.”

Ravi barely came up to the man’s collarbones and probably weighed half of what Eben did, but he was sorely tempted to punch him. “I’m going. Either you help me or I figure out a way to do it on my own.”

Eben gaped at him, doing a fair impression of a landed fish, and Ravi threw up his hands in frustration and stomped off. Following the path down to the river he’d taken with Daks yesterday, he managed to locate the same boatman. After the fourth rejection he received, he was getting desperate.

“No coin, no passage,” the asshole said, repeating the same line he’d heard far too many times already.

“You took the note from my friend,” Ravi insisted.

“Aye, a note for passage from an agent of the High Council. You’re not an agent of the High Council.”

“If I don’t get over there, he might not make it back to make sure you get paid,” Ravi gritted out through clenched teeth.

“Don’t need him to. I got the note.”

Ravi wanted to scream, but he forced his anger and panic down, desperately trying to come up with a solution.

“What if I had something to barter?” he asked hopefully as a thought occurred to him.

The grizzled older man eyed him skeptically. “What?”

“A horse. A magnificent stallion, strong, healthy, smart, with the endurance of ten horses. He’s sitting in a stable up at the inn as we speak.” As the man’s eyes lit up with guarded interest, Ravi leaned forward. “If I or my friend don’t make it back to see you’re paid in full from the Council, the horse is yours. I’m sure it’s worth at least twenty times one little passage across the river, right?”

The man sucked his teeth for a moment before he gave Ravi a begrudging nod. “Bring me the horse and you have a deal.”

“What? No.”

He shrugged. “No horse, no deal.”

Ravi’s teeth were going to crack if he didn’t stop clenching his jaw so tight. “Fine,” he huffed and stomped his way back up to the inn.

The stables attached to the inn were in chaos when Ravi first got there. Several stall doors hung open, and horses, goats, and donkeys wandered freely while a short, round-bellied man shouted orders at two young boys and a small pile of wet straw lay smoldering in the center aisle. Ravi searched the smoky space and blew out a relieved breath when he found Horse standing calmly in his stall, surveying the chaos around him with what seemed to Ravi to be regal amusement instead of fear or anxiety.

“What you want?” one of the boys asked him sourly while tugging on the lead to a rather recalcitrant mule.

The boy received a cuff on the ear from the round man, who hurried over. “Sorry, young sir. We’ve had a little mishap this morning, but it’ll be under control soon. What can I do for you?”

Ravi wasn’t exactly dressed for the part of a “young sir,” but he supposed the stable master had seen him come in with Daks, which hopefully meant he wouldn’t have any trouble.

“I’m here for our horse,” he said as confidently as he could muster. When the man hesitated a fraction of a second, Ravi added, “We’ll take him out of your way for a little while so you have one less thing to worry about. I’ll get him myself, no need to trouble you.”

He started walking before the man could form a reply. And as he’d hoped, the man had too much on his hands to put