Dreaming the Hound by Manda Scott Read Free Book Online Page A

led them, only the mark of the serpent-spear above. To the right, a woman led the mounted warriors of the west in a wedge that struck at the gathered wings of Roman cavalry and pierced the enemy’s flank. The ranks of the cavalry folded and collapsed and those who wished to live fled the field leaving the
    centre unguarded. A second wave of Eceni rode in to fill the gap.
    The battle was won long before the killing ended. Slowly, unstoppably, the warriors pushed forward to join in the centre over the mounting bodies of two legions.
    The moment of meeting was exquisite. At the heart of battle, a Roman standard fell and was trampled into filth. The serpent spear blazed in victory over it. My gift, said the ancestor. Mark it well.
    For a long time afterwards, there was darkness, and cool rock, and the river running by. Breaca sank slowly to sitting and then to lying and trailed her injured arm in the water.
    She was not a dreamer to call forth visions, but lying on the cool rock with her face turned to the river she did her best to bring alive her own daughter, that she might see her whole and beautiful and safe on Mona, and not broken in the slavers’ pen of the ancestor’s threat.
    Straining so that the sweat beaded her brow, she built a fire that danced on the water, and a hazing of air above it. There, feature by feature, she drew the oxblood hair and grey eyes, the fine, wine dark brows and the careful, cautious gaze of Graine, the daughter she had barely seen since her birth. The child of two warriors so tall should never have been so fine and so slender, but Graine was everything her parents were not, and more beautiful for it. Born into Nemain’s light, she was a dreamer from the fine sheen of her hair to the soles of her feet.
    Breaca could not build all of her daughter, only her face, framed by the rich, dark hair, and that took more effort than she had known possible. Then, when she thought she could only make half formed shapes in an imagined fire, she heard the sound of Graine, weeping.
    The shock of it broke the vision. Where her daughter had been, a hare fled across a hillside, coursed by Stone, last son of Hail, and then Airmid was there, peering through the flames, and Airmid’s voice echoed through the cave saying, ‘I don’t know how she’s hurt, small one, you have to tell me. I can’t see where you can see.’
    The vision had gone before she realized that the words were of her, not for her, and that, with their touch, the burning in her arm was a little less.
    She did not try to call Cunomar. Her son had barely spoken to her in the three long years since his escape from captivity in Rome. It was no secret that he had failed in battle at his father’s side in Gaul and that every part of him yearned to erase that shame; that he waited daily for the elders to call him to sit the warrior tests of
    his long-nights so that he might prove himself the man he ached to be.
    As a mother, Breaca felt for him. As a warrior, she knew that the child could not become a man until he had learned to command his own temper - and that the longer the elders deferred their call, the less likely it was that he would find the peace he needed to do so.
    Lacking that final approval, Cunomar hunted the enemy with the single-minded hatred of a wounded bear and his mounting tally of kills did nothing to heal the many wounds of his soul. Waking and sleeping, resentment flowed from him, thick and clear as river fog.
    From the cave dark beyond, Breaca heard the voice of her father, Eburovic. Your son craves your love. Why do you not give it?
    Eburovic had given his life for her and she had loved him before any other man. Alive or dead, she had never heard him speak anything but the truth. She stared into the dark and could not see him, but his presence enfolded her in his care, as the ancestor’s had not done. She was not alone.
    She said, ‘I have made kill-feathers for my son each time he has slain one of the enemy. I have given