Read A Stranger in Olondria: A Novel for Free Online

emerged on the cliffs, my vest was so wet the sea wind chilled me. About us the crags lay tumbled and white with guano, and beyond them a sea the color of spittle moved in regular heaves.
    “How do you bear it?” I muttered.
    Lunre stood calm in the midday glare, chewing a shred of ginger root. “I am not sure what you mean.”
    “You know what I mean. This place.”
    “Ah. This place.”
    “You’ve been to Bain, to the great library. You’re Olondrian. You’ve been everywhere.”
    “Everywhere! Indeed not.”
    “Other places.”
    “Yes.” He shrugged, looking out to sea. The breeze was growing cooler, and fat clouds blocked the sky. In places the sun shone through them, silver, making them glow like the bellies of dead fish. Every day, I thought, every afternoon, this rain.
    Lunre slapped my back, chuckling. “Don’t be so gloomy. Look!” He darted back to the edge of the forest and plucked a bell fruit from the undergrowth. “Look around you!” he went on, returning to wave it under my nose, dispersing a sickening odor of hair oil and liquor.
    I batted his hand away. He laughed as if it were a game but at once regained his usual pensive look, his hair standing up in the wind. The sky turned the color of dust while in my mind there were porcelain tiles, medallions embossed with the seals of Olondrian clans, monuments of white chalk. I longed for wide streets loud with the rumble of carriage wheels, for crowded markets, bridges, libraries, gardens, pleasure houses, for all that I had read of but never seen, for the land of books, for Lunre’s country, for somewhere else, somewhere beyond. Thunder broke in the distance, and the afternoon darkened around us. Lunre spat out his scrap of ginger root, and it whirled on the wind. We hurried home beneath the shrieks of agitated birds, arriving as the storm fell like an avalanche of mud.
    At home the archways were full of sound. In the hall I looked at Lunre, barely able to see him in the rain-dark air. He lifted one pale hand and spoke.
    “What?”
    “I’m going to read,” he repeated, louder.
    “Me, too,” I lied and watched him melt away in the south wing.
    When he had disappeared, I went to the stone archway that gave on the courtyard. A low gleam pierced the storm from a window on the opposite side: my father was in the room where he kept his accounts. I dashed across the courtyard, soaked in seconds, and pounded on the locked door.
    A click, then a juddering sound as the bolt slid back. Sten, my father’s steward and shadow, opened the door and stepped aside to let me in. I rubbed my hand over my face, throwing off water, and blinked in the dull radiance of the little brazier at my father’s feet.
    He was not alone. Two elderly men from the village sat with him beside the brazier, men of high rank with bright cloaks on their shoulders. Their beaky faces turned to me in surprise. My father sat arrested, an iron rod in his hand, its tip aglow. A servant knelt before him holding a sturdy block of teak wood; similar blocks were stacked beside him, ready for use. Behind the little group, silent and ghostly, arranged in rows as high as the ceiling, were other blocks, my father’s records.
    I threw myself on my knees on the sandy floor. “Forgive me, Father!”
    There was a pause, and then his expressionless voice: “Younger son.”
    I raised my eyes. He had not touched my head, but he was too far to reach me, the brazier and the kneeling servant between us. I scanned his face for anything I could recognize: anger, acceptance, disappointment. His eyes were slivers of black silk in the fat of his cheeks.
    I waited. He lowered his iron rod to the brazier, turning it in the coals. “This is my son Jevick,” he explained to the old men. “You’ll have forgotten him. He doesn’t compete in games. I brought him a foreign tutor, and now they spend all their time gossiping like a pair of old women.”
    One of the men laughed briefly, a rasp of