Brothers' Fury (Bleeding Land Trilogy 2) by Giles Kristian Read Free Book Online Page B

had last kissed his soft cheek and inhaled his scent, and it had been a cold writhing in her guts ever since.
    ‘Do you recognize the place, Bess?’ Joseph asked, watching a great white owl that was observing them from atop an old post stuck in the marsh that bordered the stream on their left. Ahead, at the end of a well-worn track from which grass and weeds sprouted in tufts, stood a rambling old farmhouse that seemed to Bess to be subsiding into the wild profusion of climbing plants surrounding it.
    ‘I came here once but I was too young to remember it,’ she said. Then, on reflection: ‘I do recall orchards. I remember challenging Tom and Mun to see which of them could steal the most apples without getting caught.’ That faint memory was a blush of warmth on a frigid day. ‘My grandfather was a strict man.’
    ‘And who won?’ Joseph asked, seeming genuinely keen to know.
    ‘I don’t remember,’ Bess said, though if pressed she’d havewagered that Tom would have retrieved the most apples but would also have got himself caught.
    The nerves were beginning to announce themselves, her skin suddenly sensitive to her linen’s weave and even the coarse wool of the travelling cloak on her shoulders and back, now that she was so close to the old place. To her grandfather. If he is even alive, she thought, for no one in Shear House ever spoke of Lord Heylyn, Earl of Chester, nor had they since his and his daughter Lady Mary’s great falling-out more than twenty years ago. It had been a sharp disagreement and barely sheathed, so that everyone within sight of Parbold Hill knew that Lord Heylyn thought his daughter had married beneath herself in Sir Francis Rivers. The earl had threatened Mary with being cut off if she went ahead with the marriage, or so Sir Francis had revealed to Bess and her brothers one Christmastide around the table, when the malmsey had loosened his tongue and the festivities were in full flow.
    Bess’s mind tortured her now by conjuring the memory, even gilding it with the dancing flames of the parlour hearth, and her family as it once was. Sir Francis with his pipe resting between his lips. Their mother dressed in the old fashion, a ruff at the neck and wrists, copper eyebrows raised indulgently at her husband, perhaps wishing he would not speak of it, but it being too late now to stopper the bottle.
    ‘But your grandfather might as well have tried blowing the wind back the way it came as tried telling your mother what to do,’ Sir Francis had said, a mischievous smile cinching the pipe’s stem. ‘Besides which, your mother was always going to marry beneath her, no matter the man.’ This had been meant as a compliment, Bess had realized years later. At the time, though, she (and her brothers, too, perhaps) had reeled in shock at their grandfather’s threat and she remembered feeling – unfairly, she knew now of course – more sorry for her father because of the insult than for her mother because of Lord Heylyn’s indifference to her heart’sdesires. But Bess had been a girl and a girl will always pity her father.
    The thing had of course unfolded neatly enough so that all knew their place around it. Lady Mary had made good her own ambition, marrying Sir Francis because she loved him and going north with him to Shear House. The earl had proved as stubborn and resolute as his word, having nothing to do with his daughter or her new family other than a handful of solemn requests to see his grandchildren when they were young. And even those requests had dried up, perhaps because those children, the progeny of a mere knight, whenever they came pillaged his beloved orchards.
    ‘Well, someone is here,’ Joe observed, nodding towards the grey-black smoke rising silent as the long dead from a shamble of chimney upon the farmhouse roof. The wind was whipping the smoke eastward, up into the bitter, heavy sky. For a long moment Bess watched it rise, reflecting that it was her grandfather’s ire