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eBook Category: Fantasy
eBook Description: It's hard being the only person in your family with no significant magical ability. But it's much worse when you're the only one still free during an attack by a neighboring mage.

eBook Publisher: Marion Zimmer Bradley Literary Works Trust, Published: Sword & Sorceress 20, 2003
Fictionwise Release Date: April 2008

29 Reader Ratings:

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Available eBook Formats [MultiFormat - What's this?]: eReader (PDB) [17 KB] , ePub (EPUB) [35 KB] , Rocket/REB1100 (RB) [11 KB] , Portable Document Format (PDF) [175 KB] , Palm Doc (PDB) [11 KB] , Microsoft Reader (LIT) [64 KB] , Franklin eBookMan (FUB) [82 KB] , hiebook (KML) [58 KB] , Sony Reader (LRF) [45 KB] , iSilo (PDB) [9 KB] , Mobipocket (PRC) [12 KB] , Kindle Compatible (MOBI) [45 KB] , OEBFF Format (IMP) [20 KB]
Words: 3145
Reading time: 8-12 min.
Microsoft Reader (LIT) Format: Printing DISABLED, Read-Aloud ENABLED
Portable Document Format (PDF) Format:  Printing DISABLED, Read-Aloud DISABLED
All Other formats: Printing DISABLED, Read-aloud DISABLED

The air in the forest clearing shimmered like water, with a noise like a distant thunderclap. The shock of unleashed magic rippled through Miri. She straightened up, a mushroom clutched in her hand.

It came from back there. From home.

She knew at once that the wave of energy meant danger. The only mage presently at the manor, her Aunt Katwin, wouldn't have cast a spell of such shattering force for practice.

Aunt Katwin had ordered Miri out of the workroom in exasperation, after Miri had reduced another beaker to fragments the size of gravel while trying to enchant a potion. To keep me out of trouble, Miri thought. I'm not good for anything else. She communed with plants and sensed their qualities, but that talent gave small consolation to a family who had hoped for another powerful mage like the rest of her mother's kin. At the age of sixteen, Miri still showed ineptitude in every other branch of spellcraft she'd tried. So once again she'd been banished to the woods to gather mushrooms for dinner, leaving Aunt Katwin in peace to pore over the latest rare codex she'd bought at auction.

Dropping a red-spotted fungus into her basket, Miri rubbed the center of her back and listened. No more unnatural sounds. No rotten-fruit scent of evil sorcery--but, then, she wasn't close enough to pick up such a taint. Her mother or brother might possess the required sensitivity. They were away from home, though, attending the Duke's court with her father.

Miri brushed off the knees of her trousers and started back to the manor. She walked lightly, listening with ears and mage-sense for any hint of a threatening presence. Underbrush drew away from her footsteps to clear a path, a phenomenon so natural to her that she hardly noticed it anymore. Closer to the house, she tiptoed from tree to tree, clinging to their trunks as if they could protect her. Her skin began to tingle. Her forehead became clammy with nervous sweat.

When the trees thinned, she paused to reconnoiter. Now she caught a whiff of the overripe-fruit aroma she associated with malignant magic. A hand pressed to the bark of a spindly pine brought her an image of what it had "seen" within the past hour: A column of men armed with bows and shortswords snaked through the forest toward the manor. Their blue livery looked familiar to Miri, but for the moment she couldn't place it.

The crack of a twig banished the vision and snapped her back to the present. Not twenty paces away, a brown-bearded man dressed in that same blue tunic stood and gaped at her.

She stared back, frozen for an instant. When he drew his sword, she backed away from him.