11.01 Death of a Hero by John Flanagan Read Free Book Online Page A

Halt, his eyes showing shock at the fact that this was the way his life was to end. He fell over sideways, his hands desperately trying to stem the flow of blood from the wound. Halt stood warily for a second, making sure that Jerrel was truly finished. His recent experience with Kord had made him careful. Then, satisfied that Jerrel wasn’t about to rally for another attack, he knelt quickly beside the stricken woman.
    Her face was white and drawn with the savage pain of the wound. Halt looked at the amount of blood she had lost already and knew she had no chance of surviving. She looked up at the stranger who had tried to save her, whom she had saved with her desperate attack on Jerrel. She saw the sadness in the dark eyes looking down at her and knew the truth. She was dying. Yet there was something she had to know.
    “My . . . husband . . . ,” she managed to gasp. “Is he really dead?”
    Halt hesitated. He was tempted to lie to her, to comfort her. But he knew he could never carry off the lie. He nodded. “Yes,” he said. “You’ll soon be with him.”
    He saw the sudden look of anguish in her face as her eyes turned toward the cot in the corner of the room.
    “Our son . . . ,” she said, and coughed blood as she spoke. Then she made a massive effort and recovered herself. “Don’t leave him with the villagers . . . He’ll have no life with them . . . We’re strangers here . . . They’ll work him to death . . .”
    Halt nodded. Daniel and his wife were new arrivals in the area. They wouldn’t have friends in the village to take care of their infant son. An orphan would be a burden to most villagers. His only worth would be as a worker—a virtual slave.
    “I’ll take care of him,” he said gently, and the woman reached up and seized his hand in a surprisingly strong grip.
    “Promise me,” she said, and he placed his other hand over hers.
    “I promise.”
    She studied his eyes for several seconds and seemed to find reassurance there. She released his hand and sank back onto the blood-soaked floor. She spoke again, but her voice was so soft, he didn’t hear the words. He bent to her, turning his ear to her mouth.
    “Tell me again,” he said, and this time he could make out the whispered words.
    “His name is Will.”
    “It’s a good name,” he told her. But she didn’t hear him. She was already dead.

8
     
    H E BURIED THE WOMAN IN A SMALL CLEARING BEYOND THE HOME paddock, marking the grave with a stone. He didn’t know her name, or the family name. So he inscribed the stone with a simple legend: A BRAVE MOTHER .
    Kord and Jerrel deserved no such treatment. They had destroyed a happy, loving family, so he dragged their bodies into the woods, leaving them for the foxes and crows.
    The baby slept quietly in his cot while Halt attended to these matters. As Halt sat nursing a cup of coffee in the disarranged house, the infant woke and muttered quietly. Halt noted with approval that he didn’t cry.
    “I expect you’re hungry,” he said. He had a warmed bowl of cow’s milk and a clean linen cloth ready. He twisted the end of the cloth into a narrow shape and dipped it into the milk, then placed it by the baby’s mouth. The lips formed around the cloth twist and the baby sucked the milk from it. Halt dipped it into the bowl again and repeated the process. The system was time-consuming but it seemed to work. The baby watched him as it fed, big, serious brown eyes staring at him over the milk-soaked cloth.
    “The question is,” Halt said, “what am I to do with you?”
    The farm, he knew, would revert to the baron of the fief, who would appoint another tenant family to work it. So there was nothing for the infant to inherit. He couldn’t leave him here—as the mother had so desperately pointed out. And he couldn’t raise the baby himself. He simply wasn’t equipped to look after a baby, nor was he in any position to do so. His work as a Ranger would keep him absent