Spirit Gate: Book One of Crossroads by Kate Elliott Read Free Book Online

aside, and a man ducked in under the canopy. He looked, first, directly at the stone head and the girl cowering there, rocking back and forth on the balls of her feet, staring at him in terror. Marit got a good look at his face: that of a man in his early twenties, with broad cheekbones, a mustache and beard, and astonishingly long lashes above deep-set eyes. To her shock, she recognized him.
    Radas, lord of Iliyat. He held one of the local authorities under whose auspices order was kept in the Hundred, and he was unusual only in that lordships—local chiefs whose right to office passed through a direct bloodline—were rare, an artifact, so the tales sang, of ancient days and even then known almost exclusively in the north.
    His gaze flicked down to her. When he saw that the blindfold had been tweaked aside, annoyance narrowed his eyes.
    “Have you touched her?” he said to the girl. Although he did not raise his voice, the change in his tone made Marit shiver and the girl quiver and moan.
    With a snort of disgust he let the branches fall and vanished back into the light.
    “She’ll have to be killed,” he said. “She’s seen me.”
    “Right away, my lord,” said the baritone.
    “Nay, no haste. It would serve my purposes best to let the men do what they will. It’s necessary that they understand that reeves aren’t to be feared or respected. After that, if she’s still breathing—slit her throat.”
    “Yes, my lord.”
    “Where’s the eagle?”
    “This way, my lord.”
    They moved away. In the camp, the noises of men at their tasks trickled back into life. Evidently the woodsmen feared the lord of Iliyat as much as the girl did—and yet, Marit could not fit the two pieces together. She’d seen Lord Radas at court day in Iliyat, a mild-spoken young man passing judgment and entertaining merchants. Less than a year ago, she’d brought in a criminal to Iliyat’s assizes, a thief and his accomplices who had raided two warehouses. The ringleader had been sold to a manbrokering for Sirniakan merchants; he’d be taken out of the Hundred into the distant south, into a life of slavery far from home with no hope of return. No worse fate existed. The accomplices were young and foolish; they’d been given eight-year contracts to serve as indentured servants, slaves of the debt they had created through their crime. It was a merciful sentence.
    She could not reconcile that man and this one, yet they were clearly the same.
    “Hsst. Girl.”
    The girl looked up. Her eyes were dry but her expression was that of a child who has given up crying because she knows comfort will never ever come. Her eyes were bruised with shadows; her cheeks were hollow, and her complexion more gray than brown.
    “Come closer.”
    She shook her head. “I shouldn’t have touched you. Now he’ll punish me. He likes to punish me.”
    “What’s your name?”
    “I don’t have a name anymore.”
    A stubborn one. “I’m called Marit. Reeve Marit. If I can free you, will you help me?”
    “We are all slaves to the will of the Merciless One. There is only one road to freedom.”
    There wasn’t time to be subtle.
    “There’s a knife hidden in my right boot. I can’t reach it, but you can. Then you can free me.” Marit wiggled her shoulders and hips and rolled onto her left side to display her bound arms. Her shoulders were aching badly, but that was the least of her worries. She knew better than to think about the problem posed by that chain and that stake. When she won free, she had to alert the reeve halls to this blasphemy and Lord Radas’s treason. She wouldn’t have time to struggle with the stake. It was a cruel decision, but necessary.
    “A knife!” The girl crawled forward. Her expression changed, but the disquiet raised in Marit’s throat by Lord Radas’s frown tightened, and she had to cough out a breath as the girl tugged off Marit’s right boot and swiftly, with strangely practiced hands, probed the lining. Faster