Blood to Blood by Elaine Bergstrom Read Free Book Online Page A

her shelter and rolled along the ground until she was some distance from her makeshift camp. There, she took form and studied the intruder.
    A slender youth no older than twenty, about the same age she had been when she was taken from her grandfather's palace. Sexless in appearance but the scent was female. Joanna moved closer, trying to decide what to make of the thief.
    Not Gypsy. Not Turkish. The hair was too golden, the skin as pale as Karina's had been. Joanna moved closer and let her form become solid. Closer yet, until she was so close she could grab the girl and feed. Then she inhaled and spoke, her voice loud, intending to provoke fear. " Nu te atinge de acela !"
    The girl only turned and looked at her curiously, saying something in a language Joanna did not recognize.
    Had her own speech become so dated, or did the girl perhaps come from somewhere else? "Say something I can understand!" Joanna ordered with the last of the air still in her lungs.
    "I thought the horse lost… ah… am gîndit cal pierde" the girl said slowly in Romanian. Her accent was thick and foreign to Joanna, but the words were understandable.
    " Pierde ." Joanna tittered and grabbed the girl's arm. She felt the pulse, barely noticeable to another human or the girl herself, rolling through her, rapid with fright.
    "Yours?" The girl pointed to the animal. "I am… îmi pare rau ." She reached into the dirty leather tunic covering her body from shoulders to knees and took out a coin, holding it out to Joanna.
    "Not thief. For you," she said. Fear did not motivate this, Joanna thought. It was honor.
    Joanna shook her head. There was something else here that she wanted desperately, though she dared not claim it. The hunger in her was immense, overpowering even her hysteria. If she gave in to it, the strength of it would fade, and with it her tenuous hold on sanity.
    She shook her head again.
    The girl backed away, then turned to face the road. To Joanna, who understood the feeling all too well, she seemed ready to bolt for freedom.
    Something Joanna's brother had told her came back to her. She needed to find a creature like this to see her safely to the ship, across the seas to… The name of the place where he had gone, and where his enemies lived still eluded her. "Go Varna?" she asked simply, hoping the girl would understand.
    The girl turned back to her, frowning. "What did you say?" she asked in that same language. Joanna realized that she had heard it before, not long ago. English, her brother had called it. The language of her enemies. He spoke it. So did Karina. Joanna had learned a few words of it from the English in the castle: hardly enough to get by.
    "Go Varna?" Joanna asked and gestured toward the horse and cart before pointing to herself, something the girl seemed to understand more than the Romanian words. She nodded.
    "You. I. Go," Joanna added in English and saw the girl's suspicious expression break into a happy grin.
    The girl built a small fire. Joanna brought her meat, the remnants of her own kill, to cook and eat. During the next hour, through a mixture of English and Romanian spoken slowly, Joanna learned something of her new servant. She was Colleen Kelley O'Sh———, some name Joanna could never pronounce. She was from Ireland, and just eighteen. Through some quirk of fate Joanna could not understand. Colleen had stowed away on a ship she thought bound for her homeland, not realizing that it was not going to Ireland, but east. She nearly starved because she was afraid that if she came out of the hold she would be thrown overboard or raped. So she foraged at night, surviving as best she could. When the ship finally landed in Constanta some weeks ago, she had run as far from it as possible.
    Since then, she had lived off the land, and begun to realize that this was not at all a haven for her. She had been making for the port at Varna, hoping to find a ship bound for the west, when she'd spied Joanna's horse.
    And, though