Servant: The Dark God Book 1 by John D. Brown Read Free Book Online Page B

taken to the altars for hearing voices in my head. And so I never answered. She said that the fullness of time had come. She promised to make me whole. Promised all sorts of things. Lunatic promises. But I was too scared. I think she wanted to help.”
    She thought of Mother and her horrible speed, her terrible secrets. All this time they’d thought the wisterwife charm was a blessing, a gift. It was an annual ritual for most people to fashion a Creator’s wreath and hang it above their door to draw the blessings of the wisterwives. The wreaths were fashioned with rock and leaf, feathers and bones. Many set out a gift of food or cast it upon the waters. But Regret had his servants as well. So who knew what this charm really was? That charm could be anything. “You think it was real?”
    “I don’t know what to think.” His voice caught. Sugar couldn’t see his tears in the darkness, but he held his head the way he always did when he was in pain.
    Sugar wanted to cry with him, wanted to feel overwhelming grief. But she was empty, as desolate as rock. And that pained her as much as anything else. What kind of daughter was it that had no tears for the butchering of her parents?
    And what kind of daughter was it that ran? She’d had her knife the whole time. Furthermore, she’d been trained how to use it.
    “Da always said you were an uncanny judge of character,” said Sugar. “If your heart tells you to be afraid, then let’s trust it. Da would have.”
    Legs leaned into her, and she took him into an embrace, putting his face in her neck and stroking his hair.
    Things to act and things to be acted upon. She had a knife. Lords, she’d had at least six, for there were a number in the kitchen. She could have done something. She could have sent Legs to the pheasant house, gone around back herself and surprised that line of bowmen. She could have distracted a whole group of men. She might have tipped the battle.
    Why? Why had she run!
    And if she hadn’t run, if, beyond hope, she’d tipped the battle, what then? She’d seen Mother. Seen her horrible power.
    Legs gently pulled away. “Will we talk to Horse?”
    They had no tools to survive in the wild. Besides, an army of hunters would be combing the outer woods, expecting them to run there. If Horse helped them, and that was a desperate if, then maybe they might be able to survive until all but the most patient hunters gave up dreams of a bounty and went back to their normal labors. If she and Legs survived that long, that’s when they would escape.
    “I don’t know,” said Sugar. “Let’s just take this one step at a time. Right now we need to find where they ford this river.”

5
Thieves
    TALEN, SON OF HORSE, sat at the wooden table in nothing but his underwear because he had no pants. Somehow, during the middle of the night, they had walked off the peg where he’d hung them. And he’d searched high and low. The last of their cheese was missing as well.
    The cheese he could explain: if you were hungry and a thief, then a cheese would be a handy meal to take. But it was not the regular poverty-stricken thief who roamed miles off of the main roads, risked entering a house, and passed up many other fine and more expensive goods to steal a pair of boy’s dirty trousers hanging on a peg in the loft.
    No, there wasn’t a thief in the world who would do that. But there was an older brother and a sister who would.
    Talen had two pair of pants to his name. And he wasn’t about to ruin his good pair by working in them. He needed his work pants. And to get those, he needed leverage. The good news was that he knew exactly which items would provide that leverage.
    It only took a few moments to find and hide them. Then he went back to the house, cut three slices of dark bread, and put them on a plate in the middle of the table next to the salted lard.
    River, his sister, came in first from outside carrying a massive armload of rose stems clustered with fat rosehips.