Servant: The Dark God Book One (Volume 1) by John Brown Read Free Book Online Page B

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. Talen sighed. She had fifteen bushels of the stuff in the back already. Were they going to make rosehip syrup for the whole district? And he knew he’d be the one that would have to cut each and every hip and remove the seeds so her syrup didn’t end up tasting like chalk. It was a thorny business, even if he did wear gloves.
    River walked to the back room to deposit her load and returned. Blood spattered her apron. A thick spray ran from her cheek to throat.
    “What happened to you?”
    “Black Jun,” she said. “The cow that was bred by that rogue bull, her water broke last night, but the calf was too big.” She shook her head. “Jun’s brother-in-law from Bain cut into her this morning and made a mess of it.”
    “Did she die?” asked Talen.
    “Not yet,” said River, “but such a wound, even with old Nan’s poultice, would take a Divine’s hand to keep it from corruption.” River had been apprenticed to Nan who had midwifed as many cattle as she had humans. That’s where River saw how to take a calf that was too big by cutting in from the side. That’s where she’d learned about the virtues of everything from pennyroyal to seeding by moonlight. She could have learned far more, but old Nan went out late in a rainstorm one night and tumbled down a steep slope to her death. Even so, if River said the wound was bad, it was bad.
    “And the calf?” asked Talen.
    “Saved,” she said. “For now.” She took off her bloody apron and hung it on a peg on the wall.
    Under the apron, River was wearing her work pants, which