Blood Ties by Pamela Freeman Read Free Book Online

bridge slung precariously across the drop, on the main road that a little farther on led through the village. The bridge was one of the reasons Wooding was more prosperous than most villages: there was no other way to get to Carlion. Unlike the bridge site, here in the forest the chasm was much narrower and the rock on both edges was soft and crumbling.
    Bramble didn’t take the roan too close to the edge, but they stood there for a while in the mist and moisture that rose from the wild turbulence of the river below, where the water leaped and spouted over huge boulders which had fallen from the cliffs. The noise of the falls, just out of sight around the bend upstream, shook the ground and made the roan uneasy. Bramble slid down from his back to soothe him.
    “Nothing to frighten you here, sweetheart,” she said.
    She loved this place. She loved the sudden drop that seemed to entice her to fly out and fall, loved the raging of the river below, the clouds of foam that boiled over the edge of the falls and along the rocks. In the clouds and mists of the chasm, there were swarms of swifts that lived their whole lives on the wing, landing only to build nests and lay their eggs in the crevices of the cliff face. Peering over, it was as if the birds were emerging from the water, their curves and turns in the air like the splashes of white foam. Stunted trees clung to the ledges and crevices and there were ferns in every tiny niche: the cliff wall was itself a waterfall of green and golden stone.
    Unexpected and dangerous and beautiful, the chasm was the wildest thing she knew, and she had come here all her life when she felt too enclosed in the village. The roan quieted under her hands and voice, and even put his head forward to inspect the chasm with interest.
    Bramble took him back to the cave and groomed him thoroughly, reluctant to leave him. She finally tethered him for the night and ran home.
    After dinner, the third evening after she’d killed the man, she leaned on the gate next to her granda and looked down the road that led out of the village.
    “Don’t you miss it?” she asked him, meaning what Travelers called the Road, the wandering life. She meant all the things she yearned for but couldn’t describe.
    “Why would I, with all that I love right here?” Granda replied.
    It was the same answer to that question that she’d heard all her life. She’d been ten or eleven before she realized that he never answered her straight, but always with another question. And was thirteen, maybe, before she could read the look in his eyes when he stood at that gate and looked down the road to the horizon.
    Tonight she wasn’t minded to accept his answer.
    “If you had things to do over again,” she said, “would you have settled?”
    He turned to look at her. Though his pate was bald, he still had a rim of dark hair around his scalp. He still walked strongly upright. Bramble could see the man he had been at eighteen, when he’d broken his hip and couldn’t walk for a season. His parents, who were drystone fencers, had paid for Bramble’s great-granny to board him until he could travel to meet them. But long before that, he and Bramble’s gran had snuck off to the haystack and made her da, so he ended up staying and learning to be a carpenter from her great-granda.
    He searched her eyes. “You’re thinking of taking the Road,” he said with certainty.
    “Been thinking of that all my life,” she said cheerfully, surprised by how well she could hide it. “No change there.”
    He looked relieved. “It’s a hard life for a young girl, all alone. Travelers aren’t liked anywhere. Well, you know that.”
    “I know it, but I’ve never understood why.”
    “Some Travelers say the sight of us reminds them that they don’t really belong here, that what they have they stole. And that makes them angry. But I reckon it’s just that everyone likes to have someone to look down on. When the warlord rides roughshod over