Entreat Me by Grace Draven Read Free Book Online

had deepened while she stood on one side of the ravine trying to figure out how to attract the attention of someone in the castle so they’d lower the bridge.  “Hello the house!” The wind shredded her hail to silence.  She cursed and tried again.  “Cinnia!  De Lovet!”  Glimmers of light appeared then disappeared in the blacker spaces of windows.  As inconstant as will-o’-the-wisps, the lights danced from one window to another, from one level to another, never stopping in one spot for longer than an indrawn breath.  A more superstitious person might fear they watched the active haunting of this dark place, but Louvaen didn’t put believe in ghosts and haints.  She did believe in people carrying candles up and down stairs.
    She growled her frustration.  “I don’t have time for this nonsense.”  A week of hard travel, the terror of finding Cinnia injured or dead, and the strange whip and pull of a magic spell that instantly transported her and her horse hundreds of miles to halt in this barren spot stunned and disoriented, had left her short on patience and long on temper.  Hugging the edge of the world in a snowstorm while shouting herself hoarse didn’t improve her mood.
    She dismounted and led the horse away from the drop-off to the stand of trees marking the forest behind her.  A rush of hot air warmed her neck as her mount whuffled at their roaming about in the dark and the cold instead of sheltering in a comfortable stable.  Louvaen stroked his nose and tied his reins to the low branch of a leafless birch.  “You’re a patient lad, Plowfoot.  We’ll be out of the wind soon enough.”  She lifted the flap of a saddle pack and reached inside.  The flintlock she’d leveled on Jimenin a week earlier rested heavy in her palm.  Far better if she’d brought both pistols, especially traveling alone, but Louvaen refused to leave her father unarmed while Jimenin plotted against him.  At least she had two spare rounds of shot in the pouch.  She’d waste the one in the pistol getting the castle’s attention, use the second to blow a hole through Gavin de Lovet if he’d hurt Cinnia and keep the third for the journey home.
    Snow fell harder, shrouding the hood of her cloak and covering her tracks as fast as she made them on her return trip to the lip of the crevasse.  The empty expanse between her and the fortress, along with the pistol’s short range, ensured her shot would fall harmlessly into the blackness below, but the noise she’d make would damn well signal her arrival.  She full-cocked the pistol, aimed at the base of the stronghold and pulled the trigger.  A corona of bright powder flash blinded her as the pistol fired a boom that thundered across the ravine. Temporarily blinded by the flash and deafened by the discharge, Louvaen closed her eyes and retreated from her precarious spot.  Behind her Plowfoot whinnied in panic, yanking on the reins that tethered him to the quivering birch.  He settled under her touch and the soothing cadence of her voice.  “Easy, my lad.  Nothing to be done for it.”  She slipped the pistol back into the pouch, promising herself she’d remember to reload.
    Ears still ringing, she watched as every window on the fortress’s first floor lit with golden light.  A silhouette, only slightly darker than the descending night and obscured by falling snow, appeared on the battlements near the gate.  Louvaen marched back to the place where she’d fired her shot and waved.  “Lower the bridge, you lackwit!”  Whoever lurked up there might not have heard her inside, but Mercer Hallis had often said his eldest child possessed a powerful set of lungs when she was angered, and Louvaen suspected the solitary watcher had heard her just fine, even above the singing wind.
    The groan and squeal of a turning windlass sounded, along with the rattle of chains as the drawbridge slowly parted from the gate and stretched across the breach.  She untied