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Spirit Gate

Crossroads Book 01




Kate Elliott
 PART ONE: SHADOWS

In the Year of the Black Eagle In the Hundred

1

ON A hot summer's day like today Flirt liked to fly straight up along the shoreline of the river, huge wings
huffing against the wind. The draft off the running water cooled eagle and reeve, and gave the raptor a
chance to get close to any unsuspecting deer come out to drink. This time of day, early afternoon, they
didn't see a single creature along the shore except once a man chopping wood who had flung up a hand
at the sound, poised, listening. When he saw them he relaxed and went back to his work as Flirt's vast
shadow shuddered along the rocks. His brindled hound barked, then hushed, ears flat, cowering, as Flirt
answered with a piercing cry of her own. She didn't like challenges.

Marit grinned. The man kept chopping and was soon left behind.

Woodland spread up on both sides of the Liya Pass, hills covered so thickly with beech that Marit
couldn't see the ground. Here and there a stand of silver birch glimmered on rockier earth, leaves flashing
in the wind. The air was smooth today, a steady wind out of the northeast that blew at crosscurrents to
their line of flight, but Marit didn't like the smell. She shifted in the harness and wiped sweat off her brow.
There'd been something nasty in the air ever since last winter; she knew it and the other reeves knew it.
Anyone knew it, who ever tilted her head back to take a look around; who ever stopped to listen.
Probably the woodchopper knew it, which is why he'd been scared for that moment, expecting the
worst.

Shadows.

"Lust and greed and fear," old Marshal Alard of Copper Hall had said at winter feast. "Mark my words.
Blood has been spilled in the wrong places, but we don't know where, not yet. Keep your eyes open.
Don't turn your backs."

Not that reeves ever turned their backs, or kept their eyes closed. The Hundred was a broad land made
prosperous by towns and villages and markets, by cultivated fields, wide pasturelands, rich forests, and
treasure buried in the earth. Yet there were as many hidey-holesтАФand forgotten caves and old ruins and
secret glades and ravines where dangerous creatures might lurkтАФas there were laughing children.

Like all reeves, she'd ridden a circuit of the land her first year out of Copper Hall. She knew how wide
the land was. She knew how the ocean bounded the Hundred to the north and east and how the Spires
and Heaven's Ridge with its Barrens protected the good folk of her land from their enemies to the south
and west.

"Our worst enemy has always been the one within, Flirt," she said to her eagle, but the rushing wind