The Cradle of Ice Cover Image


The Cradle of Ice

Author/Uploaded by James Rollins

The author and publisher have provided this e-book to you without Digital Rights Management software (DRM) applied so that you can enjoy reading it on your personal devices. This e-book is for your personal use only. You may not print or post this e-book, or make this e-book publicly available in any way. You may not copy, reproduce, or upload this e-book, other than to read it on one of your pe...

Views 27164
Downloads 397
File size 1.7 MB

Content Preview

The author and publisher have provided this e-book to you without Digital Rights Management software (DRM) applied so that you can enjoy reading it on your personal devices. This e-book is for your personal use only. You may not print or post this e-book, or make this e-book publicly available in any way. You may not copy, reproduce, or upload this e-book, other than to read it on one of your personal devices. Copyright infringement is against the law. If you believe the copy of this e-book you are reading infringes on the author’s copyright, please notify the publisher at: us.macmillanusa.com/piracy. TO VERONICA CHAPMAN, who started me on this road long ago. I continue to follow the guideposts you left behind. When the world stopped turning, new lands were born. I sit frozen in place, a hand hovering over crisp parchment. Trepidation grips my heart, saps my will. My hand trembles. I seek any excuse not to continue her story. I make bargains and sift through arguments in my head. What difference would it make in the end? Who will read these words? Who will study the scribbled sketches of a past fallen into shadows? There are none who remember her, none who could recount the cost in blood, and strife, and misery. Still, I must forge on—not for some future reader, not even for myself. But for another. She still stares at me from the sketchbook propped near the window, where each day’s first light shines upon her ashen hair, the scowl of her lips, the jeweled blue of her eyes. That heavy gaze dares me to tell her story. It weighs upon me, burdens me, reminds me of a promise I made long ago. Still, I have held off, resisted her. Two seasons have passed me by. I used that time to return to what I previously wrote, to scour for truths that escaped me with the first telling, details that might have portended what was to come. I reread how a beclouded girl regained her full sight, a cure found in poison, how she fled both prophecy and the king’s legions. I saw how fate and folly drew the pieces of some grand game of Knights n’ Knaves to her: a second-born prince, a broken knight, a recalcitrant thief, a figure sculpted of flowing bronze, along with countless other minor players. But none less than her winged brother who had come to share her song and heart, binding the two closer than any siblings. Still, that was just the beginning. The first tale was one of innocence, where even hope could be found amidst the bloodshed. It concluded with the forging of a purpose, a union to defy prophecy, to seek to melt the amber locking the Urth in place and set the world to turning again, to thwart the doom found in one word: moonfall. What ONE THE ICE SHIELD Whenne frost burns skinne, who ken tell ice from fyre? —Found in The Kronicles of Rega sy Noor, account from the first explorer beyond the Fangs, who vanished during his second expedition 1 NYX HELD HER hand up against the brilliant swath of stars. The warmth of her breath misted the icy darkness, obscuring the view enough to make it look like some spellcast illusion. Alone atop the middeck of the Sparrowhawk, she gazed at the wonder above. She had never imagined such a radiant glittering existed beyond the sun’s glare. Then again, how could I have known? As the wyndship continued its westward flight under the arch of the night’s sky, she recognized how small her existence had been until recently. All her life had been spent within the Crown, where night was but a dimmer gloaming of the day. She pictured the bronze orrery in her old school’s astronicum, where the sun was represented by a spherical kettle of hot coals around which tiny planets spun on wires and gears. She pictured the third orb—the Urth—driven by the orrery’s complicated dance. As her world circled the sun, it never turned its face away. One side forever burned under the merciless blaze of the Father Above, while the other was forever forbidden His warmth, locked in eternal frozen darkness. The Crown lay between those extremes, the circlet of lands trapped between ice and fire, where the life-giving love of the Father Above nurtured those below. And now we’ve left it all far behind. She shifted her hand toward the reason for this perilous flight. With the cold numbing her bare fingers, she measured the full face of the moon, as bright as a lantern in these dark lands. She tried to judge if its countenance had swollen any larger, searching for evidence that her prophecy of moonfall could be true. She again heard the screams from her vision, felt the thunderous quake of the land—followed by the deafening silence of a world destroyed as the moon crashed into the Urth. She could not tell if

More eBooks

Heart Stalked Cover Image
Heart Stalked

Author: Keri Ashe

Year: 2023

Views: 13486

Read More
Left for Dead: A Paranormal Women's Midlife Fiction Novel (Gwen's Ghosts Book 4) Cover Image
Left for Dead: A Paranormal Women's...

Author: J.R. Rain; H.P. Mallory

Year: 2023

Views: 36347

Read More
The Sins We Survive Cover Image
The Sins We Survive

Author: Danielle Renee

Year: 2023

Views: 58794

Read More
100 Lifetimes of Us Cover Image
100 Lifetimes of Us

Author: Maggie Gates

Year: 2023

Views: 28851

Read More
Another Cup of Java Cover Image
Another Cup of Java

Author: Erin Wade

Year: 2023

Views: 1404

Read More
Falling Hour Cover Image
Falling Hour

Author: Geoffrey Morrison

Year: 2023

Views: 44770

Read More
Emergence Cover Image
Emergence

Author: jess whisper

Year: 2023

Views: 44197

Read More
All Your Life Cover Image
All Your Life

Author: Lily Foster

Year: 2023

Views: 27310

Read More
Kept Cover Image
Kept

Author: Amy Pennza

Year: 2023

Views: 6154

Read More
Last Stand Cover Image
Last Stand

Author: Paul Heatley

Year: 2023

Views: 18788

Read More