Soulvine 03 A Bright and Terrible Sword by Anna Kendall Read Free Book Online Page A

bitterness.
    I could picture the remote, rough-country manor house. The pages and young lords, as wild as the landscape, would not have used a boy like Leo gently.
    ‘Was that where the badger fighting took place?’
    ‘Yes. There was a wedding, my lady Judith with a rich lout from Her Grace Isabelle’s queendom. The feasting and drinking went on for three days. The night of the third day the merry sweet lads … they …’ His fingers, as if of their own volition, touched the scar on his face.
    ‘Leo, did the older nobles not recognize your talent? Not treasure it?’
    ‘That lot could not recognize any talents but fighting and whoring. Except Lady Judith. She was married against her will to that … that oaf … she with her sweet heart and beautiful …’
    Hs voice had dropped in pitch, full of emotion. I knew what I was hearing; I had once felt it myself. Leo Tollers, kicked and ridiculed, the butt of vicious pranks, had loved a high-born girl he could never have.
    I said, ‘Why did you not cross over to escape the badger?’
    ‘I did. But this was before the breach between the lands of the living and the Dead had crumbled enough to permit hisafs to cross bodily. My body remained behind, and so I was maimed. And crossing over … I hate it. I always have. How can you do it so blithely? The passage through the grave ….’ He shuddered.
    ‘Doesn’t that make you an odd recruit to your Brotherhood of hisafs ?’
    ‘They saved my life,’ he said sharply. ‘One of them chanced to be at Lord Jasper’s manor; he stopped the lordling’s sport and saved my life. A week later more arrived with a spare horse and took me away.’
    ‘Then how did you end up in Galtryf?’
    ‘I don’t want to talk about it.’ He bent over his lute, strumming and tuning the strings. I reached out and put my hand across the fret.
    ‘I know you don’t want to talk about it, Leo. But I must know. I don’t understand this war, and now that the Brotherhood has found me, I must. Why were you sent to me? I do not wish to take part in the conflict, and the web women have told me I should not.’
    Leo spat a curse, so filthy it startled me. ‘The ”web women”! Those old hags! They would lose us this war with their prattle about the web of life and death and their cowardly reluctance to kill anything!’
    It seemed an odd statement, given that Leo did not seem very brave, but perhaps he did not see himself as a coward. Men seldom did. I ignored his anger about the web women and returned to my question.
    ‘What is the Brotherhood trying to do? And why are you with me?’ Certainly it was not as protection.
    In the dimming light under the willow tree he gazed at me a long time. Finally he said, ‘The Brotherhood is trying to kill all the hisafs who are making the obscenities performed on Soulvine Moor possible. You know about those, I think. You have been there.’
    I had. Twice. The second time I had barely escapedwith my life. ‘How many hisafs have sided with Soulvine Moor?’
    ‘I don’t know.’
    ‘How many have the Brotherhood succeeded in killing?’
    ‘I don’t know.’
    ‘What do they want with me?’
    ‘They only want to know where you are.’
    ‘Why?’
    ‘I don’t know.’
    ‘You brought me this marker so that I may be located at any moment, and yet you don’t know why?’
    His temper flared. ‘I told you, I am here only because your father was kind to me! I don’t care about this war any more than you do, not really! But I must live and eat the same as any other beast!’ He picked up his lute and began to strum, harsh angry chords. I could see that he would tell me no more tonight. I left the willow to gather more wood.
    As I hunted for dead branches, I considered Leo’s story. Some parts of it did not seem consistent. If he were really an intimate of my father at Galtryf, wouldn’t he know more than he professed to? And if the Brotherhood had rescued him once, from Lord Jasper’s manor, wouldn’t they