Talon
Publishing Details Talon by Amanda Greenslade Published by Tigerace Books
www.tigerace.com
© Amanda Greenslade The moral right of the author has been asserted. All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright restricted above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.
Ebook Version
1st Edition 2016
Designer: Amanda Greenslade Distributor: Australian eBook Publisher
National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry:
Creator:
Greenslade, Amanda, author.
Title:
Talon : an epic fantasy adventure / Amanda Greenslade.
ISBN:
9781925427448 (paperback) 9781925427424 (ebook) 9781925427431 (Kindle ebook)
Series:
Greenslade, Amanda. Astor chronicles ; 1
Subjects:
Fantasy fiction. Adventure stories.
Dewey Number:
A823.4
www.amandagreenslade.com
Talon
The Astor Chronicles
Book
1
Amanda Greenslade
Author’s Note
I first began writing Talon at the tender age of 14, inspired by my love of animals and fantasy novels by authors including Jennifer Roberson and Maggie Furey. I completed many drafts, self-edited, restructured, rewrote and grew up in the process of writing the novel and planning a series of eight books.
I engaged the services of four very different, talented editors: Stephen Thompson, Wendy Sargeant, Rebecca Wylie and the late Lin M. Hall. I am very grateful to these editors and to the many readers who made their way through various drafts to give me invaluable feedback.
I am also thankful to my family, especially my mother Kathy, for cultivating my love of writing from a young age. It has taken nearly twenty years for me to reach a point where I feel the first book of The Astor Chronicles is ready to be published, but it will not take that long for the rest of the series to come out!
Thanks also to Eve Doyle for the vector version of my hand-drawn map, and artists Sheridan Johns and Adele Sessler for artwork.
I hope readers all over the world will enjoy The Astor Chronicles.
www.AmandaGreenslade.com
www.facebook.com/amandagreensladewriter
twitter.com/starsabre
Chryne
East of the Kiayr Ranges
Contents
Chapter One—Who am I?
Chapter Two—Bonded
Chapter Three—Transformations
Chapter Four—Fishing
Chapter Five—Anzaii
Chapter Six—The Wavekeepers
Chapter Seven—Intruder
Chapter Eight—The Quarry
Chapter Nine—Heirloom
Chapter Ten—The Letter
Chapter Eleven—Rade
Chapter Twelve—The Darkening of the Sky
Chapter Thirteen—The Immortal Children
Chapter Fourteen—Allies and Enemies
Chapter Fifteen—Sting
Chapter Sixteen—Animal Instinct
Chapter Seventeen—Recovery
Chapter Eighteen—Strength and Weakness
Glossary
About the Author
Chapter One—Who am I?
Light. Glorious, blue prisms of light sparkled off every leaf and branch. Thick, powdery sap burbled slowly inside the crystalline structures. The Great Sapphire Tree of Jaria was one of only a few hundred sapphire trees that were still known to exist. Its leaves were hard and thick as sapphires, its branches like iron bars. Such trees were rare, most having been harvested for the mineral sapphite long ago.
I brushed the leaves with the tips of my fingers as I passed the tree, and stooped to get to the cave behind it.
I hadn’t made the climb to see the tree, rather to get at the cave and a likely source of milk bulb. I leaned down with a lamp, sniffed the air and listened. A soft scuffling noise reached my ears. Heart thumping, I withdrew my iron knife from its sheath.
‘Who’s there?’ I asked.
A faint growling rumbled off the wall of the cave. It was too deep and throaty to be a treelion. I guessed it was something more like a rock panther or maybe even an icetiger.
I tried to keep my breathing even. Today’s journey had just got a whole lot more interesting. Perhaps I would come home with a bond-mate of my own, after all my years of waiting.
There were a dozen Rada with rock panthers in Jaria presently, but no one was bonded with an icetiger.
Don’t be silly, I told myself, trying not to get my hopes up. The best I can hope for today is to see one and live to tell the tale.
I shuffled further into the cave, holding the lamp high enough to throw light into its dark recesses. I saw only rocks, roots, spiderwebs and bones.
I pulled a pair of spicy dried sardines from one of my pouches and lay them on the ground.
Retreating back towards the entrance, I set the lamp between myself and the possible predator. I unhitched my pack, retrieved the leather mask from within and arranged it so that the bright eyes were on the back of my head. Gatherers, like me, often used them to keep great cats at bay in the forest. A wild cat was less likely to attack if it thought it was being watched.
I took a few deep breaths and decided it was safe to continue my work.
I tore a section of vine from the roof of the cave. The plant grew deep inside the walls. It would take much work with my pick-axe to determine where the precious bulbs were concealed.
If there was an animal inside the cave and it decided to attack me, despite the mask, I would use the pick-axe to defend myself. I’d rather not cause any lasting damage, just enough to scare it off.
I began the laborious task of hacking at the cave wall, removing rocks and dirt from around the vine.
A scuffling noise came from behind me. I turned ever so slowly to see a large white paw retreating into the darkness, fish in tow. Then there was the faintest sound of jaws smacking together and a large tongue cleaning a muzzle.
A surge of excitement passed through me. If I trusted that glimpse of a white paw, the creature in this cave with me was indeed an icetiger. Furthermore, somewhere inside me, I found that I knew the animal was sentient.
‘How long have you been here?’ I asked.
If I was right, then this was some fortunate Jarian’s new Rada-kin. Mine? The words I spoke were probably the first human words it had ever heard and understood. When the great cat still did not show itself, I sighed and went back to work. It would come out when it was ready. Besides, night was not too far away and I wanted to get this finished and start a fire.
I was on the third axe-head when the rocks around the milk bulb finally gave way. About two feet into the cave wall was the biggest cache of milk bulb I had ever seen. It would be fortunate if I could manage to carry it all back to Jaria. I used my knife to dig away the rootlets and dirt around the bulbs, severed their cords, and hauled them out in pairs.
Having lined them up at the mouth of the cave, I collapsed in a heap and lay panting for some time. The day-star hovered on the horizon. From my vantage point on the side of an incline I could see over an expanse of forest. The dying light made the balls of mist that hung over the landscape glow like fire.
Wild geese flocked across the sky to the east. Harmless though they were, I turned my eyes away from them
, barely suppressing a shudder. Of all the animals in the world, birds were my least favoured.
Lying on my back with my head propped on my pack, I rubbed at the scar on my left wrist. It was the source of my nick-name and of my one true fear.
‘Who?’ The word came as an interruption to my thoughts, jolting me out of my reverie.
‘Talon,’ I replied. My heart thumped with excitement. The great cat!
‘No,’ it repeated, with a fierce edge to its voice. ‘Not “who are you?”. Who am I?’
I sat up. This wasn’t my imagination. It was real. That voice in my head… could it possibly be a voice for me? A Rada-kin, finally… for me? My soul soared and I had the distinct impression of Sy-tré, the wolf herald for my people, running and leaping for joy. My time had come—like my parents before me, I was a Rada!
‘Enough about you!’ the voice accused, ‘What have you done to me?’
I got to my feet slowly, feeling dizzy. There in the shadows behind me was a huge blue and white icetiger, its fur standing on end; puffed up it was even more immense and frightening than I had pictured. Its back was level with my thigh, large yellow fangs gleamed in its snarling maw and the tail thrashed like a farm cat’s. Thick blue-grey stripes and myriad black and blue spots covered its luscious pelt—no wonder these creatures had been so hunted that they were now rare.
‘How dare you?’ the voice shrilled. The wild cat ran forward several steps and seemed about to pounce on me. I held my ground. A drawn out yowl escaped the cat’s lips. ‘Speak prey! What am I?’
The joy I had felt was joined by a thrill of fear. The great cat’s raw ferocity and mental power stunned me. I blinked, trying to clear my senses, which seemed to have expanded. Smell, hearing, sight and touch vibrated outwards with a depth of perception I could not have imagined. I was suddenly aware of other creatures, plants, watercourses and wind I had not noticed before. Their sounds and smells were all around the icetiger and me. Each whisker and hair on her body seemed to be receiving and processing these impressions with ease.
Frustrated by my distraction, the icetiger growled and lifted its paw to strike.
‘Who am I?’ the cat shrieked.
‘Apparently you are a Rada-kin’, I replied. ‘And for whatever reason be known to Krii, it appears that you are my Rada-kin.’
The cat stared at me for a long time, seeing and hearing far more than the words I spoke through the waves. I frowned, trying to remember if the other Rada-kin I had escorted to Jaria had been so affronted. I hadn’t been able to hear them in my mind, but I knew the body language of animals well. Most had seemed confused at first, then grateful, not only for the longer life but also for the sentience and fulfilment granted to them. It was a special gift for an animal as most were destined to live out their lives oblivious to the gifts of the Lightmaker.
Pulling thoughts out of my wide-open mind the icetiger responded with a menacing tone and a sharp flick of her tail. ‘Easy for you to say. You’ve had plans and purpose all your life. Imagine me, awakening one day, to find a question in my mind: “is there more to life than hunting and sleeping?” It’s unnatural.’
‘Indeed,’ I replied, smiling at the first hint of the tiger’s sense of humour. ‘You are no longer a natural animal. You are now a being of three dimensions.’
The icetiger padded slowly into the light and walked in a circle around me. She sniffed me from in front and behind, eyeing me. She growled and licked her lips.
‘What is this “life” and “death” you define yourself by?’ she asked.
‘I don’t define myself by them,’ I replied. ‘What makes you say that?’
‘“I am alive”, “my parents are dead”—are these not thoughts that define who you are?’
I supposed that at the most basic level I did define myself as alive and those I had lost as dead but to explain the intricacies of life and death to an animal was surely like speaking about it to a child. I hardly knew where to begin.
‘I am not only alive physically,’ I began, ‘but spiritually as well.’
‘Yes… I sense three facets to you….’ the icetiger replied. She fished through my knowledge for the words to describe what she perceived. ‘Body, soul, spirit?’
‘That’s right,’ I replied enthusiastically, ‘The soul or “mind” is what links the body to the spirit, more than just one’s intelligence, thoughts and desires.’
‘Your body is alive. Your parents’ bodies are dead, but their spirits are alive?’ She was smart, and quicker to understand novel concepts than a child.
‘Yes. There are three domains to our existence, each layered atop the other. The domain of the body is where we are here and now. The domain of the soul is the waves, through which we now converse. The domain of the spirit is harder to define and reach but it is the part of us that exists despite all else and the part that persists after our bodies die.’
‘How do you know if you’ve never done it?’
‘The Lightmaker tells us in the scrolls.’
She hesitated, needing more time to come to terms with what scrolls were than with the deep spiritual truths we discussed.
‘I know this Lightmaker already,’ the icetiger said with conviction. ‘Somehow I have always known him.’
‘Perhaps all animals know him in their soul,’ I suggested.
‘And now I have a spirit, like yours?’ the cat asked, with the first hint of being impressed with her new circumstances. ‘Body, soul, spirit.’
I bobbed my head, blinking slowly in a feline gesture of trust and approval. She allowed me to edge slightly closer.
‘Even though their spirits live on, it hurts that your parents left you here alone,’ she said curiously, delving deeper in my mind.
‘I try not to think about it.’
‘You try….’ she retorted.
The icetiger was picking up things all the time, meanings behind words I rarely even thought of. My very thoughts and memories seemed to be open to her, so I wondered if I could reach into her mind likewise.
A surge of wild instinct filled me. For a moment all I could think and feel was the need to fight or flee. The icetiger’s experiences were so alien to mine that I found myself sinking down to the floor. It was a carefree life she had given up. Not without pain and struggle but free from the burden of sentient thought. Until now her soul had been that of a natural animal—simple and pragmatic. Now it fired with the spark of the spirit, and emotions she had never experienced before.
Crouched on all fours, I locked eyes with her. She stared straight back at me with shocking blue eyes the colour of sapphire tree leaves. She raided my memories, springing and pouncing on them, devouring the happy times, sniffing and licking dispiritedly at the sad. Some kind of understanding passed between us. She looked at me and saw me for everything I was. It was the first time I had felt so connected with another living being.
‘Well,’ she said after a while, ‘if I am stuck with you, then how about some more of that fish?’
Chapter Two—Bonded
‘Keep still, human!’ the icetiger instructed me.
She was crouched ahead of me in the long grass, stalking a deer as it drank from a creek. The tan-coloured animal’s neck was stretched over a patch of mud, its lips straining to reach the clear liquid beyond. My mouth watered with an urgent hunger. The icetiger inched forward, belly pressed so low that grass and mud stuck to it. We were strategically placed downwind from the deer—my Rada-kin said the animals of the forest could smell me a mile away otherwise.
I could smell the deer through the icetiger’s senses and its scent was accompanied by her ancient instinct to hunt and kill. The restraint it took for the hunter to creep slowly toward its prey with this instinct screaming at her was incredible.
‘Please stop distracting me with your thoughts.’
‘I don’t know how to keep them to myself.’
She crawled forward when the wind rustled the long grass, masking the sound of her near-silent
approach.
The icetiger had been keen to show me how hunting was done by a master predator. Persistence was the key, she had told me. When one hunt was unsuccessful, you sought the next opportunity without dwelling on the failure on the last. From what she had seen in my mind, there was something of a lesson in this for my kind, she said.
So far this morning we had attempted three kills but, every time, something had happened to tip off the prey, whether it was me making a noise, birds sounding the alarm or the wind shifting.
I turned my attention back to the icetiger, on the verge of bursting from the long grass. The deer threw its head up, along with two of its fellows, sniffed the air and barked a warning to the herd. This time I couldn’t tell what it was that alarmed them, but their instincts were so attuned to the natural sounds of the forest that it could have been anything. There was a hush as the wind died down, like the calm before a storm. The icetiger exploded from hiding.
The herd of deer panicked and bolted. The icetiger’s blue form blurred across the distance between them, startling an elderly-looking deer that hadn’t been as aware of the danger, into the creek. Despite its age, the creature bounded away swiftly, with hooves lifting high. Water splashed in every direction as the icetiger plunged in after her prey.
I stood up to witness the chase, on the far side of the creek, just in time to see the deer change direction, to avoid a wall of thorns, and the icetiger’s powerful front paws crash down on its back. There was a sickening crack and the deer was only able to struggle feebly as the icetiger slid her teeth into its neck. She lay there panting and growling over her kill, eyes glaring ferociously.
The hunting instinct was so strong it blurred my thoughts and, for a second, all I wanted was to fight her for the chance to feed on the deer. I rubbed my head, trying to clear my thoughts. It was difficult to reach the icetiger’s mind. She growled thunderously at me when I got to the edge of the creek.
Talon (The Astor Chronicles Book 1) Page 1
