A Kingdom Besieged - Raymond E. Feist

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long sigh. ‘But what the King wills is law.’

      The younger female was quiet for a while as the sun to the east grew brighter. ‘Where do we go?’ prodded Child.

      After a moment, her mother answered, ‘To the east, towards the lands of the Savages and the Mad Ones.’

      ‘Why?’ asked Child.

      ‘Because there is nowhere else to go,’ answered her mother softly.

      A smile crossed the child’s lips and she said, ‘No, there is another place to go.’ Suddenly she lunged forward and her fangs closed around her mother’s throat and with one pull, she tore it open. Blood fountained and she drank deeply as the light faded from her mother’s eyes.

      Thoughts came with the feeding, not her own, but those of the being whose life she ended.

      A time of calm, with a male, by the name of Dagri, who was her father. He had vanished with the King.

      Images flashed, some understandable and some not, places, faces, struggles and quiet. And some of the holes in her knowledge were filled in as the more abstract knowledge she had gained from the Archivist blended with her mother’s experiences.

      There are been a stable time, a time of Dahun’s dominion. Then word had come of a struggle to the west. Dahun’s kingdom was not one of the Old Kingdoms, but one of the Second Kingdoms, those that ringed the five original Kingdoms.

      Then there had been a war, not here, but in some other place, against a king named Maarg, and her father and others had gone with Dahun to fight him. No one had returned, leaving only the City Guardians and those who knew magic to face the Darkness when it appeared. No one knew what had become of the Old Kingdoms.

      Bits and pieces of knowledge of those times and places seemed to float around the periphery of her thoughts, almost understood, tantalizingly so, but still not coherent. She knew one thing, though: if she were to survive, she needed more knowledge and power.

      She regarded what was left of her mother’s body, then consumed what was left. She kept feeling odd sensations as she did so and tried to put a name to them, but couldn’t. In a strange way she regretted the need to feed on the female who had brought her into this world, but her abstract knowledge of her race’s breeding history made it difficult to understand why she would feel a bond with this female more than any other. She paused; the Archivist thought of their collective society as ‘the race’, but her mother had been taught to consider herself a member of ‘the People’. She understood that this was a distinction, but why it was important eluded her.

      She crawled out from under the overhang, peering about for any threat. In the distance she saw a group of flyers frantically beating towards her, so she ducked back under the overhang until she was certain they had passed. Peering to the west, she saw a dark spot on the horizon. From the knowledge she had inherited from her feeding she knew it to be something fundamentally wrong, and a radical and terrible change in the order of her world, yet it remained abstract to her. She had no feelings about that.

      Feelings?

      She paused. Strange sensations in the pit of her stomach and rising up into her chest and throat visited her, but she had no name for them. For an instant she wondered if she was in danger from them, like poison or exposure to dangerous magics.

      Something tickled the edge of her consciousness. She paused and considered this unfathomable material. From the knowledge she had gained from the Archivist, she understood that memories were either there or not. To have memories from those devoured, yet be unable to reach them, was unheard of; so this must be something else.

      But if it was something else, then what was it?

      Still not enough knowledge, she thought, and certainly not enough power. She must hunt. She must grow stronger, more powerful.

      There was a stirring above and suddenly another flyer dropped out of the evening sky. Without thought, she reached out a hand, but not in the clawed defensive position. Instead, her palm faced the attacker and a searing bolt of energy shot from it and slicked cleanly through his neck, severing the head, which dropped at her feet as the body crashed into the rocks a few feet away.

      The child felt only mild hunger, but knew she needed more food to become more powerful than she was.

      She hunkered down to begin eating the flyer’s head. ‘Magic,’ she said softly to herself. But she had not encountered a spell-caster, let alone devoured one. Even more softly she pondered, ‘Now where did that come from?’

      Then she set about eating the creature’s brain.

       Hunt

      THE HORSES REARED.

      The two young riders kept them under control, their long hours of training used to good effect in the face of the unexpected attack. From the brush behind them came the shouts of the men-at-arms and the baying of the dogs, signalling that relief would be there in minutes. Until then, the two youthful hunters were on their own. The two riders had come through an upland scrub of gorse and heather, growing in a swathe of sandy soil that had been denuded of trees in ages past.

      Searching for wild boar or stag, the brothers from Crydee had stumbled upon something both unexpected and terrifying: a sleeping wyvern.

      First cousin to a dragon, the green-scaled beast was far from its usual mountainous hunting grounds, and had been asleep in a deep gully masked from their approach by tall ferns and brush.

      Now, disturbed from its rest, the angry beast rose up, snapping its wings wide to take to the sky.

      ‘What?’ shouted Brendan to his elder brother.

      ‘Don’t let it get away!’ replied Martin.

      ‘Why? We can’t eat it!’

      ‘No, but think of the trophy on the wall!’

      With a grunt of resignation, the younger brother dropped his boar spear, threw his leg over his horse’s neck and dropped to the ground, nimbly removing his bow from his shoulder as he did so. His horse, usually a well-trained mare, was all too happy to run off as fast as possible from the large predator. Brendan drew a broad-tipped arrow from his quiver, nocked his bow and drew and fired in a matter of seconds.

      The arrow flew truly, striking the emerald creature squarely at the joint of shoulder and wing, and it faltered. Slowly, the wing drooped limply.

      Martin leapt off his horse, gripping his boar spear tightly, and his horse sped off after Brendan’s mount. The injured wyvern snarled and reared up and inhaled deeply, making a strange clucking sound.

      ‘Oh, damn!’ said Brendan.

      ‘Down!’ shouted his brother, diving to the right.

      Brendan leapt to the left as a searing blast of flame cut through the air where he had been standing only a moment before. He could feel the hair on his head singe as the flames missed him by bare inches. He kept rolling, unable to see the wyvern, though he could hear it roar and smell the acrid smoke and blackened soil as it attacked wildly.

      Having clutched the spear to his chest, along the same axis as his body so that he could come swiftly to his feet, Martin launched himself upright. The wyvern seemed momentarily confused by having two antagonists moving in different directions. Then it fixed its eyes on Brendan and started to suck in more air. From what Martin knew of wyvern behaviour, his brother was about to be targeted again with another blast of flames. He cast the spear despairingly, but the range was too far: it fell agonizingly close, but short of the creature.

      Suddenly, miraculously, an arrow sliced through the space between the brothers, taking the wyvern in the throat. The creature gagged, choked, and staggered backwards, then shuddered and began to thrash in pain. Reprieved, the brothers raced

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