His brother Jamie had been taken when Lee was just a baby, while they still lived in Pennsylvania. They hunted the descendants of the Silver Bear, harvesting the gifted for the Trade. The Roses had followed the lineages west from the port cities in the east.
Knew what these raiders were looking for, and why. Only seven years before, Confederate General John Morgan had led his raiders through these southern Ohio hills. They would sweep through the village on the river, search the outlying farms, and then disappear, sometimes for as long as a year.īandits, their neighbors called them, and speculated that they'd been soldiers in the recent War of the Rebellion. Besides, the Roses' previous attacks had been hit-or-miss affairs. Lee knew that, afterward, but his father was a farmer, and a farmer can't afford to stay out of the fields too long during the growing season. They had been back only a fortnight after a month on the run. Not lazy, exactly, but largely inefficient. His parents complained that it took him two days to do a day's worth of work. He was the youngest, a little spoiled, the only one of four children to display the telltale signs of a wizard's stone. In those days, Lee was slight of build, though his father always said his big hands and feet predicted height and broad shoulders when he was grown. The Roses came for them during his tenth summer. The scent of wood smoke and roses always took him back there, to the boy he was and would never be again.
0 kommentar(er)
