Green: The Beginning and the End by Ted Dekker Read Free Book Online

night.
    “Stop this.” Mikil said, stepping forward. “For the love of Elyon, stop this foolishness.”
    “Back off.” The growl came from Marie now.
    Johan joined Mikil. “She’s right, this is proving nothing.”
    Marie jerked the blade from her shoulder and sent it flying in Johan’s direction. “Back off!”
    He slapped the blade from the air before it reached him and snarled. The general in him hadn’t forgotten how to move.
    But before any of them could move to interfere, Marie threw herself forward and swung her blade.
    Again, Samuel deflected the blow.
    Again, Marie swung.
    Then they were in close combat, thrusting and parrying, filling the valley with grunts and the clash of metal against metal.
    The first sounds from the crowd came in the form of gasps when either Marie or Samuel narrowly escaped the opponent’s blade. Then cheers of support or objection rose from a small number when Marie landed a hard blow to Samuel’s right leg, severing his leather thigh guard in two.
    The crowd is being pulled in, Chelise thought. They are throwing aside their love for Elyon and blindly following this sickening orgy of violence. The crowd’s cheers of support or opposition swelled. Then one cry rose above them all and sliced through Chelise’s mind.
    “Silence the Horde lover, Samuel! Gut this child of Qurong!”
    Chelise’s blood ran cold. The call, a woman’s shrill cry rising above the others, had come from the right side.
    “They took my child. Take theirs! Vengeance belongs to Elyon, and he will drink their blood as they have become drunk on ours.”
    Samuel and Marie couldn’t possibly have heard the voice amid the cacophony of shouts, the roar of three thousand voices now either crying out in outrage or throwing their support behind one of the combatants.
    Chelise’s son and daughter by marriage fought on.
    There it was again, off to her right. She isolated the voice. “Gut the son of Teeleh. May Qurong and Ba’al, the servant of Teeleh, rot in hell. Qurong is the son of Teeleh, and the Horde who hunt us are Shataiki, who belong in a river of blood.” Then even bolder, so that Chelise forgot how to breathe. “May Qurong rot in hell, and all who call themselves loyal to him die under the sword of Elyon!”
    “Silence!” Chelise screamed. “Silence!”
    But her voice was hardly heard above the clash of swords and cries of outrage on all sides. Many of the people were protesting, she saw. But enough backed Marie or Samuel to spur on their bitter battle.
    “Thomas!” She spun back, saw that Thomas had vanished from her side, and quickly searched the crowd. Instead of finding her husband, she was drawn to the sight of a woman who stood on a pile of boulders, fists raised to the sky. She was glaring at Chelise. It could have been the firelight, but the woman’s eyes appeared red in the night.
    “Death to Qurong and all of his bloodthirsty offspring!”
    Chelise took a step back in horror.
    Her love for the Horde was a personal love, directed toward her own father, Qurong, and her mother, Patricia, neither of whom she’d seen in ten years. She’d become preoccupied with their rescue from the disease this last year, so much so that Thomas had asked her to stop bringing it up publicly. She needed to curb her incessant, affectionate talk about the leader of the Horde, who had ordered their extermination. Qurong was rumored to walk the halls of his palace, cursing the albinos who’d absconded with his daughter and turned her into an animal. Her love for her father was being met by blank stares, a sure sign that she was testing everyone’s limits.
    Chelise glared at the woman who ripped her father to shreds in a high-pitched voice. “‘Vengeance is mine,’ says the maker of all that is pure. He will cut off the impure branch, Qurong and his bloodthirsty priests!”
    She knew then that if this one woman challenged her to a fight over the fate of her father, she would accept. She would defend