2024-09-06 10:07:19
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Chapter 848
"Please." Her voice broke on it. "I can't marry him. I can't. But I can't let Grandpa die either. Please. You're the only one. Save my grandfather.""Your family chose to believe him," said Alex quietly. "You locked my pill in a drawer. Why is it my business now?""Because I was wrong." The tears ran down, and she did not wipe them. "About the pill. About you. About all of it. I was wrong, and he's dying for it."Alex looked at her for a long moment."Look at his neck," he said.She turned.On the old man's chest, the pearl had begun to smoke. A thin grey thread rose from it into the lantern light. The bark blackened. The pearl gave a small sharp crack, like ice on a pond, and the red line on the old man's arm stopped halfway to the elbow.Then, slowly, it began to fade."Isn't that the charm the boy gave him?" someone whispered. "The bead on a string?""It is," whispered Nina. Her hand went over her mouth. "It is."
Chapter 847
"Nina," said Mr. Wolfe weakly. "Give it to me.""Not until it's tested, Grandpa." She would not look at Alex. "What if there is poison in it?""Listen to your granddaughter, old friend," said Master Gregory gently, from the long table in the bright room.Alex stood up. He kept his voice low, for her alone."Nina. Last night you told me you'd kill me if he died. I believed you. Now believe me. Every day that box stays shut, he gets weaker."For one second, her hand shook.Then she turned away. "Everybody on this coast tells me something different. I don't know who to believe any more.""Then at least hang the string in the doorway.""Hang it, Nina," said the old man."Later." She put the lacquer box in a drawer of the long table and turned the key. The red string she dropped in beside it. The key went into her pocket.Alex said nothing at all."Tomorrow night," said Master Gregory, rising, "the masters of the coast meet at the Hunt house. I have asked them there to settle, once and for
Chapter 846
The first bullets tore into the floor where Alex had been sitting.He was not there any more.The pearl was already disollved in his blood, and the whole world had gone slow. He could see the flash at the end of each barrel.He could see the bullets come out of the dark, turning lazily, like bees in summer. He stepped between them the way a man steps between puddles.The first gunman never saw him arrive. Alex took the gun out of his hands, turned it round, and tapped him once on the forehead with the handle.The man folded up on the floor like a deckchair."He's there!""No, there!"Nine guns swung left. Alex was already on the right. He caught the next man by the collar and threw him into the two behind him, and all three went over the sofa under its white sheet and did not get up again.Somebody fired wildly at the ceiling. Glass rained down.Alex caught the barrel of the gun, still hot, and squeezed. The steel bent in his fist like warm toffee.The man stared at it. "What are you?
Chapter 845
Old fraud. Senile fool.The words hung in the candlelight. Nobody in that ballroom had ever heard them said out loud about Master Gregory. Most of them had never dared even to think them.Four hundred faces turned to the last row.Alex sat with one leg crossed over the other, his paddle still raised, as calm as a man ordering coffee.The banker's wife froze with her paddle halfway under her chair. The fat man who had bought five charms forgot to close his mouth. In the front row, Tyler Hunt twisted right round in his seat, and slowly his grin came back. Here it was. The idiot was going to drown himself in front of everyone.The auctioneer's hammer stopped in mid-air. "Ten… ten million dollars, in the last row."Master Gregory did not move. For three long seconds he only looked at the boy in the plain dark jacket, the way a man looks at a fly that has landed in his soup."Senile," he said at last, very gently, as if he were tasting the word. "I have sat at the tables of dukes. Princes
Chapter 844
The auction had not started yet, and already there was a queue.It ran down the side of the ballroom, past the gold chairs and the tall black windows. At the head of it, at a little table with a white cloth, sat a tall man with a silver beard cut to a point and rings of green stone on four fingers.Master Gregory had come down from the hills twenty minutes after Alex. The whole room had turned for him, like a field of corn in the wind."Master Gregory, from the capital!""They say the Duke's mother waited six months to see him.""And the charm, they say it will give health, luck and longevity. You cannot buy it unless you buy it directly from the master. Meeting him here is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity."On the white cloth lay a pile of little yellow paper knots. A banker's wife held out both hands for one, as if it were a newborn baby."Master," said a fat man in the queue, "twenty thousand dollars for a peace charm. Please.""Twenty thousand is nothing," said the man behind him.
Chapter 843
Alex hit the old tree at four in the morning, and the old tree did not care.His fist stopped a metre short of the trunk, the way it always did now. The air jumped. A few yellow leaves spun down onto the wet stones of the harbour wall, and that was all.He stood there with his breath smoking in the cold. The energy of heaven and earth came to him thin as the mist, a cup at a time, when what he needed was a river. To raise his cultivation, he needed rare herbs, a pill or an elixir. Westmere had none of them.When he got back, Felicia was sitting on the kitchen step with a plate of bread on her knees."You've been out since four, Prince.""I was hitting a tree.""Did you win?""It's a draw."She held up the plate. "Then eat. Even trees have breakfast."---At ten he walked up into the misty hills. He could hear the cough before he reached the door of the long grey house.Mr. Wolfe sat bent over a handkerchief that was not white any more. Nina knelt beside his chair, holding a glass of w
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Reader Comments
I wish authors or writers can get their pronouns correctly. It is embarrassing to get it wrong.