Master of the Cauldron Read Online Free

croaking. All of them were trying to make their rivals back down.
    With dogs you might get a fight, but that was dogs. It could be a fight between men too, but not if they were as smart as Garric.
    Cashel was one of the people Garric talked to before he did things. Cashel hadn’t understood why at first, he a shepherd who couldn’t read or write sitting with nobles who were used to running things. He’d seen quickly that his knowing the things a peasant knows could be useful. With nobles, what they knew got mixed up with what they called honor. Honor to a noble generally meant acting like you didn’t have any common sense.
    About fighting, for instance. A fight meant the winner was hurt too, like as not, and maybe the losers from earlier fights would pile in and turn it into an all-against-one thing that no “one” could survive. It was a lot better in the long run to talk and posture and hop up and down—and not to have to fight—because you’d convinced your rival that he couldn’t win but that you were going to let him not lose either.
    So Garric arrived at each island with a fleet and army that the ruler knew he couldn’t defeat; but instead of attacking, Garric told him how glad he was to have a loyal supporter of the kingdom like him in this place; and by the way, here was the new schedule of payments that his island would be sending to Valles to support the fleet and army.
    That’s what a Royal Progress was. That’s why Garric and his huge fleet were there on an island just off the coast of Sandrakkan, whose previous ruler had claimed to be King of the Isles twenty-odd years ago, and who’d failed, but not by so much that his nephew mightn’t have similar notions of his own.
    Tenoctris had finished the spell she’d been working. Sharina bent down to talk with her, but Cashel remained where he was as a wall between the women and the bustle on the ship’s narrow deck. No sailor would bump Sharina or Tenoctris deliberately, but they might not notice them. Most everybody noticed Cashel. If they didn’t, well, they bounced off.
    Cashel continued to scan Volita the way he would a new pasture. He’d seen a lot of places in the past five seasons. Many of them were cities, and the only parts of a city Cashel’d found he liked were the pictures city folk, wealthy ones anyhow, had painted on their walls. But there’d been countryside too, none of it really nicer than the borough in springtime but nice enough regardless.
    A ewe with a black body and an all-white face stood between half-raised pillars on the horizon, staring at the ships and men on the shore. She chewed a grass blade with the same rotary motion as a woman mixing bread dough. The hooves of sheep had cut narrow paths that wound among the ruins wherever Cashel looked, following the least possible grade across the landscape. Sheep could find a slope where water’d give up and make a pool instead….
    Cashel smiled broadly and rested his hand gently on Sharina’s shoulder, his eyes still on the shore. Volita might not be Barca’s Hamlet, but it’d do. Any place in any world would do for Cashel or-Kenset, so long as he was there with Sharina.
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    Sharina saw the crimson spark vanish from above the symbol Tenoctris had drawn on the pine planking. She put her hand out to steady the old woman, but Tenoctris didn’t sway with fatigue the way she often did after an incantation.
    â€œI’m all right, dear,” she said, though she raised her left hand for Sharina to hold and didn’t look up for a moment. “I was determining the amount of power here, that’s all. I’d never visited Sandrakkan before. In my former life, I mean.”
    Now she did turn to smile. Tenoctris appeared to be about seventy. Indeed she’d lived some seventy years, but she’d been born more than a millennium ago. She’d been ripped from her time by the wizardry