King of Assassins: The Elven Ways: Book Three by Jenna Rhodes Page B

had, to give a brusque nod as if he felt it. “Not a tangle, no. A rip.” The expression on his face chilled. “Grace—something is very wrong.”
    “Nutmeg?”
    “Not sure.” He took to his heels, horses behind him, running down the dirt lane, back toward the city, back to where she thought she felt the contradiction of universes twisting violently, beginning to rend . . .
    “Sevryn!” Hosmer called behind them and began to run after. “What is it?”
    “Trouble!” Sevryn pulled his sword. Rivergrace drew hers at the same time and knew that behind them, her brother, Hosmer Farbranch of the Calcort City Guard, did as well.
    Hosmer passed them on the street, his Dweller feet fleet and without the burden of pulling horses behind. Dust flew from his boot heels. Grace felt the sky shiver overhead. Sevryn pulled to a stop. “Rivergrace, stay behind me!” She did. He dropped the horses’ reins and shooed them away.
    The ground rumbled. She fell to one knee as buildings swayed, shutters flew open, and bricks tumbled down from a nearby structure. Sevryn’s gaze stayed fixed upward, where a brilliantly blue sky turned dark with storm clouds, swirling over and downward. Funnels surged to the earth before the clouds sucked them back up. He narrowed his vision, trying to pick through the chaos to see the threads of instability behind the unnatural storm. The force of the vision set him back on his heels, shocked for a heartbeat or two as his eyes locked with another’s.
    Daravan.
    Locked in the storm’s center, or perhaps he was its epicenter, power flaring about him, from the darkest of grays to silvery white, blinding and yet compelling. Looking into that sharp-paned face was like looking into a still water reflection of himself, but he had never felt that kind of power flowing through his own frame. Daravan’s strength rolled off him like tongues of flame that he could feel radiating hotly. He put a hand up to shade his eyes, uncertain of just what it was he was seeing.
    “Sevryn . . . what are you seeing?”
    “A vision. Perhaps.”
    He was no more certain when Daravan’s eyes widened slightly and fixed upon him.
    His father. Not a man he remembered in that position, because his mother had raised him alone until she left to follow, without telling him just who she went after. If Gilgarran had known whose son he adopted off the streets, he never mentioned it, nor had he stored the information away within his spymaster diaries. Gilgarran had either never known it or known it so well he had no need to write the truth down to remember it. Sevryn chose to believe that his own ignorance had been Gilgarran’s as well.
    “Father.” Barely audible, yet filled with the power of his Voice, in case it might be heard.
    Daravan’s focus stayed locked upon him, and then the figure stretched out his arm, hand extended. Instinctively, he reached back. Vision touched flesh, and Sevryn staggered as a force slammed into him and reached deep inside, grabbing his essence and shaking him like a dog shakes a seized prey. He fought for release, but the thing that was and was not Daravan towered over him. Time slowed to a near stop. He thought he heard a soft murmur of surprise at his back which would have come from Rivergrace, but he couldn’t be certain. An ice so cold it felt like fire encased his hand.
    “Give me all that you are. Give me back the life I gave you.” An intense need accompanied Daravan’s demand, a need that shivered inside of Sevryn, icy and determined, splintering him from the inside out.
    Sevryn could not speak his denial, but Daravan felt it and shook him harder. He clenched his teeth. “Don’t do this. You saved us at Ashenbrook.”
    The scalding ice encasing his hand moved up his arm, burning through his clothes as though they weren’t there and perhaps in Daravan’s existence, they weren’t. Stormy gray eyes with all the shadows of darkness falling bored into him.
    “You know nothing of what