Cold Redemption by Nathan Hawke Read Free Book Online Page A

Has the iron skin of the Eyes of Time taken the Beyard I knew?’
    ‘I am Fateguard,’ Beyard hissed, but his eyes flicked away in a flash of shame.
    ‘All I ask is to know whether my family lives.’
    ‘And what use is that knowledge? If you find they’re all dead, if your woman has another man, if your children are scattered and gone, will you go to the hangman more easily? For
these are all likely things. Or if you find that they wait and still mourn after all this time and all is as it was and could be again, will you die at peace?’
    ‘Let me see them and I’ll show you where the sword is hidden.’
    Beyard shook his head. ‘Take me to the sword and you’ll live until you have what you came here for.’
    ‘For your blood oath, Beyard, I’ll do that.’
    Again Beyard shook his head. ‘I’ll swear to you on the Fates themselves. For my kind that is an oath cast in iron, but I cannot give you a blood oath. I am Fateguard, Gallow. I have
no blood to offer.’

 
     
     
     
6
THE SHADEWALKER
     
     
     
     
    T he Marroc let Oribas rest for three days, eyeing him watchfully, talking among themselves in careful huddles while Oribas took care never to pry
and spent his time staring into the fire and helping around the house as best he could – simple chores that needed little strength or skill. They fed him plenty of greasy stew and he held his
nose and smiled and tried not think too much about the delicate care that his own kin put into the feasting tables of his homeland. The big Marroc Brawlic still made the sign of evil when he
thought Oribas wasn’t looking and the thin one still wanted to murder him. Sometimes Oribas caught Achista looking at him and then looking quickly away with a smile, but she was rarely in the
house and it was the older woman who brought him his food now, Brawlic’s wife Kortha. But on the third evening when Achista came into the house, she looked at him and didn’t smile and
instead pulled Addic and Jonnic away from the fire where they’d been whittling wood. The three of them talked in urgent whispers until Addic nodded and slipped his whittling knife back into
its sheath. Then he came and sat beside Oribas. ‘Aulian, there’s a shadewalker.’ He stared at Oribas hard. ‘It’s been seen again. Near Horkaslet. If you still say you
can lay it to rest, then you and Jonnic and I can leave to hunt it in the morning.’
    Oribas stretched out his hands. When the Marroc talked to him, they talked of little but shadewalkers and sometimes the Edge of Sorrows and what he knew about both. They’d been waiting for
this. ‘Salt? Iron? Water? Fire? You have these things?’
    ‘You have the fire. Water is all around you. Iron and salt we have. Jonnic?’
    Jonnic disappeared outside. When he came back, he was holding a sword in a scabbard crusted with snow. He looked Oribas in the eye and leaned into him and drew out the blade. It was old but
clean and meticulously oiled. ‘Not a forkbeard sword, this. An old Marroc one. Hard iron.’ He slammed it back into its scabbard and handed it to Addic.
    They left not long after the next dawn on the back of three mules, ploughing a path through the fresh snow down the little valley from Brawlic’s farm, following a small fast river until it
turned to run between two peaks towards the valley of the Isset. Jonnic led them to a place where one of the great Varyxhun pines had fallen across the water. He dismounted and gingerly led his
mule across the giant trunk. Oribas and Addic followed, and together they climbed a steep twisting trail that rose up the other side of the valley towards the next ridge. The Marroc didn’t
talk, and by the end of the day they were across a high snow-bound pass and into the next valley along. They spent the night in the barn of some farmer that both Addic and Jonnic knew, the Marroc
leaving Oribas with the mules while they went into the house. Addic came back out with a bowl of stew despairingly similar