Dead Country by Max Gladstone EPUB & PDF – eBook Details Online
- Status: Available For Free Download
- Author: Max Gladstone
- Language: English
- Genre: Action & Adventure Fantasy
- Format: PDF / EPUB
- Size: 2 MB
- Price: Free
Tara walked out of the Badlands to her father’s funeral, trailing memories
and dust.
The last stars failed and the sky hung blue above her and the ground
cracked underfoot. She kept to the path, a sunbaked runoff trench left by the
thunderstorms that scoured the land each season. Black-green moss
clustered in the shade of the rocks beside the trench. The moss grew slowly
and did tender work, turning the bones of the world to something livable.
One false step could erase a century of progress, so Tara followed paths
already destroyed.
Years ago, after the Hidden Schools kicked her out, she had followed
this same path, half-blind and half-dead, caked with sand and her own
blood and the blood of the carrion birds she’d caught and killed to make it
through the desert, home, to Edgemont. Home to the town she’d run away
from, years and a lifetime before.
She had left an eager angry witch-girl, drunk on sweet hope and
intimations of power that would have soured if she stayed. She had returned
a sorceress and a shell, betrayed by her teachers and by the world of Craft
she’d hoped to master. They used her and cast her out, but she refused to
die.
She had walked across the flats for weeks, alone. Each step hurt. She’d
remembered that walk many times in the years since, in the life she’d built
back east in the great metropolis of Alt Coulumb as a necromancer and
counselor to gods. There, on the sidewalk, in her small apartment, in
boardrooms and at cocktail bars, the memories felt safe, like a story that
was over. She had told dates about this walk over drinks—she was bad at
dates—told them how many miles she’d crossed, how she dealt with
blisters, how she used to fake death to lure scavengers in reach of her hands
and knife. Two Aviations into the night, she was tipsy enough to laugh
about it all. She held the story as lightly as a student might hold the answer
to a thaumaturgy problem she’d memorized off flash cards. Bloodless.
Her dates didn’t take it the same way.
Here, now, with dirt shifting underfoot, the memories did not feel safe,
did not even feel like memories: the agony of her raw throat, her cracking
skin, her swollen tongue. In pain there had been a clarity of purpose. The
desert was not dead. It was honest. Everything here—the cactus, that
circling vulture above, the dune rat whose tracks she passed, the bugs that
sang at dusk—moved to survive. Just like her.
Forward. Farther. In the end she’d made it home. To her family, who did
not understand her but pretended they could. To a life she never understood,
either.
Then the world took her up. The job offer came through. She left again.
And now her father was dead.
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