Assail by Ian C. Esslemont Read Free Book Online Page B

Hart. It was late; the fire was low in the stone hearth. Only the regulars remained: those few who paid for the privilege of passing the night on the floor among the straw and scavenging dogs. None was paying him and Gerrun any particular attention, so far as he could tell.
    So. The Old Bear was pulling together a party to make a strike for the gold fields. Why a party, though? The veteran mountain man could pick it up by himself, surely. Maybe he already had collected some few nuggets here and there over the years … He must’ve found a rich bed – one worth digging up.
    Then it came to him: Old Bear was expecting competition. He was betting that soon, perhaps by the end of this coming season, what with spring arriving, these hillsides would be crawling with lowlander and outlander fortune-hunters, raiders and outright thieves. All fighting over the claims or the sifted nuggets and dust itself.
    Best to get in early before the rush arrived, then. And he and the Reddin brothers and Old Bear had all walked the Iceblood Holdings before – no coincidence, that. All of them but for Shortshanks here. Or was that so? He studied the man covertly while eyeing the mostly empty benches of the White Hart. Never short of coin for ale was Gerrun Shortshanks, though he worked no plot of land nor laboured for others. And what of his gold earrings? The thick band of twisted gold at his wrist? Thinking of it now, how came he to such wealth? Perhaps this man Gerrun was no stranger to certain high streams in the vales where it was said a few days’ panning could set a man up for years.
    He cleared his throat into his fist and murmured, low, ‘All right. Where’s the meet?’
    Gerrun smiled and took a deep drink. He wiped the foam from his moustache. ‘Know you the camp up towards Antler Rock? Over Pine Bridge?’
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘Tomorrow, then.’
    He nodded and finished off his ale. As he rose, Gerrun signed to Ost, the innkeep, for another.
    It was a long chilly walk through the night back to his uncle’s holding where he and his mother lived now after being taken in on the death of his father. A light icy rain fell. The snow was hard beneath his boots, the slush frozen with the night’s cold. Above, the Great Ice Bridge once more spanned the night sky, glittering and forbidding. It had been obscured of late, what with the passing of the Foreigner, or Trespasser, as some named it. People had sworn it foretold the end of the Icebloods. But no such blessing followed. As he walked the path of frozen mud he wondered whether in time it would come to be seen as a portent of this gold fever and the crushing of the Icebloods beneath the boots of a horde of outlanders … if enough really did reach this far north. In that sense perhaps it truly was an omen – of whatever came to pass.
    He pushed open the door to the draughty outbuilding his uncle had grudgingly given over to them and crossed to the chest against the rear wall. He cleared away the piled litter of day to day life: the wood shavings, the old bits of burlap, wool, jute and linen his mother sewed and darned to make clothes; a wooden bowl he’d carved, now clattering with buttons, hooks, awls and needles, all carved by him from bone and antler. He opened the chest and pulled out his father’s leathers, rolled up and bound together with belts.
    The strong scent of his father wafted over him then: animal fat and smoke together with pine sap and earth. The smell of the high forest.
    ‘You are leaving,’ came the voice of his mother behind him. He turned. She lay beneath piled blankets. Her long grey hair caught the moonlight that brightened their one window of stretched sheepskin.
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘When?’
    ‘Tomorrow.’
    ‘I see. Where will you go?’
    He squeezed the heavy leather shirt and trousers in his hands, cleared his throat. ‘Down to the coastal kingdoms. Perhaps I’ll join with Ronal the Bastard.’
    After a long silence she said, ‘Take Boarstooth.’
    He