A Man Betrayed by J. V. Jones Read Free Book Online Page A

Jack, who knew little of such things. He resisted
the urge to squeeze and enfold her hand: he didn't want to risk rejection. So
he withdrew quickly and, he knew, awkwardly from her touch.
    They had been
together many months now, and although shared danger had brought them closer,
there would always be a distance between them. She was a noblewoman and he was
a baker's boy, and they could travel hand in hand for a lifetime and still end
up a world apart.
    Night after night
they had spent huddled close with only a stretch of blanket between them. Jack
knew how she smelled in the morning; he'd seen her laugh and shout, but never
cry. He knew just enough about her to realize that she would never be for him.
There would be no future in a relationship between them; love, there might be,
but that wouldn't be enough for either of them. He needed a girl who he could
hug and kiss and fight with. A girl with spirit, like Melli, but one who didn't
make him feel as if he were a clumsy country boy.
    Jack turned to the
door and began to force it back against the wind. A flurry of snow gusted forth
into the chicken coop. Jack looked back at Melli before stepping out into the
blizzard. She didn't smile. She stood rigid with the gale blowing at her dark
hair. Too beautiful by far for him. The door closed with the cut of the wind
the moment he let it go. Biting, terrible cold assaulted him, rife and sparring
snow blinded him. He'd only walked a few steps when his foot kicked something
hard. He crouched down and felt what it was. The body of the man he'd killed
four days ago. It had to be moved. For Melli. He wouldn't let the first thing
she saw once the storm passed be a dead man.
    Hands already
graying with cold sought out the collar of the dead man's tunic. The body was
embedded deep within the snow and took all of Jack's strength to free it. With
grim determination, he began to drag the body along the ground. The snow was
nearly two feet deep and the corpse cleaved through it like a plow.
    Another man dead.
How many more would he kill? At least this had been a clean death. No taint of
sorcery had marked this man's end. He'd killed with a blade and there was more
dignity in the death because of it. Or was he fooling himself? Did it make any
difference to the Halcus soldier? Sorcery or blade, he was still dead. The
mourning would be the same.
    Jack's arms began
to ache. His back felt like it would break. His hands had passed through gray
to blue, and he knew enough about the cold to realize that frostbite would soon
follow. Dragging the man's body through the snow was his penance. Master
Frallit had told him many times that a man should pay for his mistakes. If he
cut too much butter into the dough and it baked closer to a cake than a loaf,
the master baker would allow him nothing to eat for a week except the ruined
bread. Jack had resented Frallit's hard ways at the time, but now he grasped on
to the idea of atonement with an eagerness born of self-reproach.
    He was a baker's
boy, not a murderer. Everything was so different from what he was used to. It
was as if his life was no longer under his control. Ever since the morning when
he'd burned the loaves, he found himself doing things out of character. He had
killed someone for shelter. What gave him the right to put his needs above
someone else's? There was Melli, of course: he would have killed a hundred men
to give her safe haven. But if he were honest, it was more than just Melli.
Four days back, when he'd forced the door of the chicken coop and found two men
poised with knives drawn, he'd discovered something very hard and unemotional
inside of himself: the will to survive.
    It was what had
driven him through the freezing plains of Halcus, and what would make him
continue on no matter what he faced. Perhaps the incident with the loaves hadn't
changed him in any way, merely brought something out in him that was already
there. His mother was strong. Even toward the end, when her body failed,