Asunder: A Gathering of Chaos by Cameron Hopkin (children's ebooks free online .txt) 📕

to think that he might live to see the sunset. He dragged his mount to stop, reluctant to touch minds anymore. When he gestured for his elders to approach, he was relieved that the zephyrs permitted it. Conditions in the stables must have been terrible for them to accept new riders so readily.

“We have to go,” he said to the older couple. “I don’t know how many more guards are behind us.”

Renna eyed the zephyrs with distaste but mounted easily. It appeared that she was an experienced rider. “Let’s be gone,” she grated. “We’ll need to let these animals loose before we reach our inn, or else the Watch will know exactly where we’ve gone.” Gamarron wasted no time slinging Guyrin over the back of one of the beasts and climbing up after. The remaining unburdened zephyr followed after them unbidden as they raced away, leaving flames licking at the sky behind them.

Chapter 12 A Gift with Teeth

Gamarron counted his heartbeats as he foraged in the forest underbrush for firewood. It had been decades since he’d had to count the beat. At this age, he simply expected his heart to maintain its steady one beat per breath, but his body had turned as traitorous as his mind of late. Not that I lack for reasons to be having trouble with control. Between the traitorous insertion of Renna into his life, his troubles with Kest, his own madcap alteration of well-laid plans, and the stress of recovering from his arena wound... it stood to reason that the basics of the koda were hard to find.

They were camped three days’ ride from Megalith. They stayed well off the road at night and pushed their zephyrs hard on the packed-dirt roadway by day. He was fairly certain that they had outpaced any pursuit from the city by now, but caution kept a man healthy.

Their flight from the city had been unplanned and chaotic. They’d intended to return to their inn and lay low, but when they reached the waterways, they saw that the disturbance they’d created at the Coliseum had exploded into a full-blown city riot. Their inn was in flames, as were nearly a quarter of the buildings nearby. The locals were so caught up in looting and burning that few of them even noticed their nude, unconscious captive.

Giving up their spare clothes and personal effects for lost, they tried to skirt the edge of the conflagration, but then came face-to-face with a mounted City Watch squadron that had been dispatched from the Atrillmer mansion. They’d had no choice but to plunge into the chaos of the low quarter and try to outrun the pursuit. It had taken hours of blind turns down unfamiliar streets and multiple clashes with both rioters and police to finally break free of the city, and in the end, it was a chance explosion in a series of gas-filled pontoons meant to keep the heavy ship-buildings afloat – sparked by the riots – that let them get away. Pursuit had not lasted long once they reached the shore and plunged into the forest. The wilds of the Mainland were not friendly to humans, and the City Watch didn’t get paid enough to care about criminals once they were outside Megalith.

I am a criminal. He almost couldn’t make sense of the words. He was one who had help bring order to the holdfasts of the Black Isle. He sat in judgment. Yet the moment his desires contradicted Mainlander law, he had not hesitated to break it. Hypocrite. He wondered if he’d ever really stopped being the berserker he thought he had buried when he helped unify the tribes.

The wood here was aromatic and burned easily, and in just a few minutes he had a double armful of fallen branches that would keep them warm until they sought their blankets. They’d had to steal those blankets and a goodly number of clothes from the outlying farmsteads that they passed. He’d tried trading at first, but the simple folk of the forest hills did not need their ruby flats. They preferred to keep their goods – though he had found one home willing to sell them some dried sausages and withered tubers. Renna had argued against paying for what they could simply take, but he’d preempted the argument by walking up and knocking on the crofters’ door.

He reached the small clearing where their band was gathered. Nira tended the fire while Renna consulted her little book of notes. She was forever plucking leaves from the trees and comparing them to drawings in her notebook. Gamarron suspected she did it more to remind them of her priesthood authority than out of any true desire for research. That only surfaced when she saw a carnivorous or predatory plant, and then her excitement was unfeigned as she muttered about chemical secretions and acid balances while snipping samples into a vidrin vial. She had a surprising number of those tucked into her satchel.

Right now, her note-taking was likely to forestall conversation with Nira. They did not care for each other. Gamarron knew that every conflict had two sides, but in this instance, he was more inclined to be sympathetic to Nira than the acerbic Weaver Hand.

“Finally,” rasped Renna when she caught sight of him. “How hard is it to find wood?”

There are few friends in this camp. Gamarron didn’t think he’d ever seen such a disparate group thrown together – not even when he had forced three of the holdfast leaders who hated him most to go demon hunting with him. One had died, and the other two had become his lifelong friends. He did not foresee such an outcome here, on their part or on his. He did not like to think of people as tools, but that was what these individuals had to be for him. His need was too great, his mission too important, to allow other considerations to become primary.

Renna rose and snapped her notebook shut. “Get some food