Winter’s Heart by Robert Jordan EPUB & PDF – eBook Details
- Author: Robert Jordan
- Genre: Sword & Sorcery Fantasy
- Publish Date: April 14, 2010
- Size: 3 MB
- Format: PDF / EPUB
- Status: Avail for Download
- Price: Free
Leaving the Prophet
The Wheel of Time turns, and Ages come and pass, leaving memories that
become legend. Legend fades to myth, and even myth is long forgotten when
the Age that gave it birth comes again. In one Age, called the Third Age by
some, an Age yet to come, an Age long past, a wind rose above the Aryth
Ocean. The wind was not the beginning. There are neither beginnings nor
endings to the turning of the Wheel of Time. But it was a beginning.
East the wind blew above the cold gray-green ocean swells, toward
Tarabon, where ships already unloaded or waiting their turns to enter the
harbor of Tanchico tossed at anchor for miles along the low coastline. More
ships, great and small, filled the huge harbor, and barges ferrying people and
cargo ashore, for there was no mooring empty at any of the city’s docks.
The
inhabitants of Tanchico had been fearful when the city fell to its new masters,
with their peculiar customs and strange creatures and women held on leashes
who could channel, and fearful again when this fleet arrived, mind-numbing
in its size, and began disgorging not only soldiers but sharp-eyed merchants,
and craftsfolk with the tools of their trades, and even families with wagons
full of farm implements and unknown plants. There was a new King and a
new Panarch to order the laws, though, and if King and Panarch owed fealty
to some far distant Empress, if Seanchan nobles occupied many of the
palaces and demanded deeper obeisance than any Taraboner lord or lady, life
was little changed for most people, except for the better. The Seanchan Blood
had small contact with ordinary folk, and odd customs could be lived with.
The anarchy that had ripped the country apart was just a memory, now, and
hunger with it. The rebels and bandits and Dragonsworn who had plagued the
land were dead or captured or driven north onto Almoth Plain, those who had
not yielded, and trade moved once more. The hordes of starving refugees that
had clogged the city streets were back in their villages, back on their farms.
And no more of the newest arrivals remained in Tanchico than the city could
support easily. Despite the snows, soldiers and merchants, craftsfolk and
farmers fanned out inland in their thousands and tens of thousands, but the
icy wind lashed a Tanchico at peace and, after its harsh troubles, for the most
part content with its lot.
East the wind blew for leagues, gusting and fading, dividing but never
dying, east and veering to the south, across forests and plains wrapped in
winter, bare-branched and brown-grassed, at last crossing what had once
been the border between Tarabon and Amadicia. A border still, but only in
name, the customs posts dismantled, the guards gone. East and south, around
the southern reaches of the Mountains of Mist, swirling across high-walled
Amador.
Conquered Amador. The banner atop the massive Fortress of the
Light snapped in the wind, the golden hawk it bore truly seeming to fly with
lightning bolts clutched in its talons. Few natives left their homes except at
need, and those few hurried along the frozen streets, cloaks clutched around
them and eyes down. Eyes down not just to mind footing on slick paving
stones but to avoid looking at the occasional Seanchan riding by on a beast
like a bronze-scaled cat the size of a horse, or steel-veiled Taraboners
guarding groups of onetime Children of the Light, now chained and laboring
like animals to haul refuse wagons out of the city.
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