Prayer for Vengeance by Leanne Schwartz EPUB & PDF – eBook Details Online
- Status: Available for Free Download
- Author: Leanne Schwartz
- Language: English
- Genre: Historical Romance
- Format: PDF / EPUB
- Size: 2 MB
- Price: Free
PAPER BEASTS
“Some things you cannot destroy.”
—From Magna’s Hymn, The Book of Invocations
Milo
The air grew clear and green where she waited.
Milo’s breath was heavy as he hiked the last stretch to the top of
her hill. Stone pine grew thickly there, and ash, boughs written
across the sky like lines of verse. He huffed words of a poem to
soothe himself, something he’d been working on while performing
mindless tasks at the temple, sweeping out cells and delivering
breakfast to sleepy templars. His sandals crunched needles and
leaves as brittle as his nerves.
He wasn’t supposed to be here.
But he’d needed to escape the temple bustling with preparations
for the start of the festival month—all reminders of what he had to
do later that day, and how much his fate would be determined by
his success. Trestatto’s lonely second hill, topped only with ruins,
was always where he went when he felt unsettled like this.
And he wanted to see her.
He pushed through low branches, and a figure swung a blade
toward his face.
“Good afternoon,” he told the statue. She was frozen in mid-strike
so that her stone sword seemed about to cut him down where he
stood. Everything about her was bold—her strong limbs, her full
figure, the scowl of concentration upon her face. All the intensity of
her bearing down on him always struck him as if her swing had at
last driven home, sending quivers up his limbs and burrowing under
his ribs.
He stepped inside the reach of her weapon to brush away the
leaves that had fallen upon her shoulders. This wasn’t one of his
responsibilities—when he’d offered to tend to the out-of-the-way
sanct, the temple had only asked he bring the sacred boughs on
Grove Day once a year. But it didn’t seem fair that she should be left
to the elements’ whims because of her placement here on the second
hill, with only the ruins of one of the fallen temples for company.
He pulled a cloth from his belt and wiped clean the dust
accumulated in the serpentine lines of her hair, the crosshatch of
her thick braid flung off her back, the folds of her dress gathered at
her shoulders and belt, beside the sheathed knife. He turned a fresh
corner of the rag to carefully remove any trace of dust from the
creases of her lovely eyes and the curve of her cheeks.
It hadn’t been that long since his last visit, and soon, after a final
swipe over the crescent upon her brow, she was shining. Milo
crouched and pulled back the vines encroaching up her low pedestal
and tangling about her ankles, where a length of iron wrought like
ivy secured her to the block of marble. When he’d first found her,
the vines had overcrept high enough to strangle around her neck,
and moss fuzzed over her calves and the whirl of her skirts. She’d
been lost under blown leaves and sap and seeds, by grime half
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