Lord of Snow and Shadows by Sarah Ash Read Free Book Online

make her leave her home and family in Smarna for this wild, desolate place?
    He mopped the last of the broth from the sides of the bowl with the bread.
    Thinking of Smarna only brought Astasia back into his mind. For a moment the firelit glade blurred as tears filled Gavril’s eyes. He had not even been given the chance to send word from Arkhelskoye as Kostya had promised. Was he to be trapped here until the ice melted in the spring? By then she would be married, beyond his reach forever. Furiously, he blinked the tears away. Tears were no use. He must start to plan his escape.
    Kostya hunkered down in front of the fire beside him, stretching his scarred, knotted hands out over the flames to warm them.
    “Tomorrow we reach your father’s kastel,” he said, “and you come into your inheritance, Lord Gavril.”
    Gavril’s wits were sharper now that he had eaten.
    “This initiation I must undergo,” he said drily. “What does that entail? More bloodletting? More conjuring tricks?”
    Kostya gave him a long, appraising look. Gavril suddenly felt like a young, raw recruit whose pretense of bravado has been exposed as a sham.
    “It is a ceremony or a contract,” Kostya said at length, “between the Drakhaon and his
druzhina
. Do you think that hardened warriors like these would be impressed by conjuring tricks?”
    “If I agree to go through with this ceremony,” Gavril said wearily, “then I want my freedom. I want to be free to come and go as I please. To go back to Smarna.”
    “That would be unwise in these circumstances, my lord.”
    “Unwise! Didn’t my father meet my mother when he was traveling abroad?”
    “Your father had no blood feud to settle when he met your mother.”
    “Blood feud?” This time it was Gavril who looked searchingly at the old warrior. “What blood feud?”
    “Whenever a Clan Lord dies dishonored in Azhkendir, murdered in bed or in his own hall—” Kostya threw a handful of pinecones on the glowing embers of the fire. “His clan are blood-bound to find the murderer and exact their revenge.”
    “Revenge?” Gavril echoed, dreading what must come next.
    “If the murder is not avenged, the spirit of the Clan Lord cannot rest in peace. The land begins to die. Crops fail. Winters never end.”
    The cones crackled and spat, drops of crystallized resin flaring up into little flames, giving off the bittersweetness of burning incense into the black night.
    “And the honor of vengeance falls, by right of blood, to the Clan Lord’s eldest son.”
    “You mean me? I must kill my father’s murderer?” Anger flared again, impotent, cold anger. “Is that what this is about? You’ve kidnapped me to perpetuate your barbaric bloodfeud?”
    Smoke billows across his sight, blue smoke, spangled with iridescent firesparks. A young man’s face, blood-smeared, turns toward his, eyes dark with pain and horror
. . . .
    Gavril felt the old man’s hand on his shoulder, gripping hard, steadying him.
    “Are you all right, Lord Gavril?”
    Gavril shook his head, trying to clear his sight. The only smoke he could see now was the twisting woodsmoke from their fire, gray and dull.
    “But—no one knows who the murderer is. You told me so yourself.”
    Dark eyes staring at him from the crowd at Arkhelskoye with a singularly intense, unreadable expression.
    “We’ll twist a few more tongues.” Kostya turned his head aside and spat. “People talk . . . sooner or later.”
    That acrid stink of chymicals, the phial of liquid, his father’s shuddering cry, “Who let you in?”
    “No assassins will come near you, my lord. You will be well protected in Kastel Drakhaon.”
    Well protected?
    The sliding secret panel, the low voice whispering, “Come this
way . . .”
    Gavril sat, hugging his knees to his chest. However faithful the
druzhina
professed to be to their Lord Drakhaon, someone within the kastel had betrayed his father. Someone who hated all of the Nagarian blood with an unrelenting,