Tested by the Night by Maxine Mansfield Read Free Book Online

to tag along on one of his trips to take a knee and re-swear his allegiance to his king.
    Alaria wasn’t a warm welcoming place to the descendants of a traitor, not even more than nine-hundred years after the fact. Though his father, a leader in his own city, held his head high and ignored the whispers, Talon hadn’t been able to. They had gone right through him like a sharp dagger to the heart. Things like, “That one’s a Starkweather. You can smell their kind coming from miles away.” and “Once a traitor always a traitor. Blood is as blood does.”
    No, Alaria wasn’t a warm place at all. Especially if your name happened to be Starkweather. It was just as cold as its far northern frosty landscape of snow covered mountains and frozen lakes appeared to be. But then, where else would a true barbarian feel at home except where the land demanded he tame it before it would welcome him as one of its own?
    Home . Talon sighed. He couldn’t even remember the last time he’d been home let alone allowed himself a passing thought about it. The city of Bane, who along with Alaria, Halla, and Madra formed the barbarian commonwealth and was situated at the very top of the world. A never ending desert of ice and half-frozen ocean, it was cold, barren, and as unforgiving as the men who first thought it a good spot to exile those they never wanted to see or hear from again. But then, what had started out as a place to banish the guilty, had become a thriving community, and the single biggest exporter of meat and fur for the entire barbarian race.
    Alaria might well have its share of mountain goats and sheep, Halla their water buffalo and bison, and Madra their pheasant, their salmon, and deep sea halibut, but it was the Bane Bear that had been keeping barbarians warm and well fed through the never ending winters, and they’d been doing it for centuries now.
    Subconsciously, Talon rubbed the old scar that traversed the width of his right thigh. A left over memento from a long ago bear hunt when he’d ventured a little to close too soon and his father had paid the ultimate price for his son’s mistake. His breath left him, and he pushed that too painful memory away.
    Bane, where the bears were big, fifteen feet tall if they were an inch, and mean as a winter night. So mean, no man had ever been able to get within a paw’s reach of a live Bane Bear without suffering the consequences. They had claws as long as a man’s arm and as razor sharp as finely honed sabers. They were fast as lightning on the ice, and even faster in the water. Their fur was pure white in color, and they were almost impossible to spot against the snow-white backdrop of the ice desert.
    It took the spears and arrows of at least ten men to bring one down, but when accomplished, the meat from a single Bane Bear could feed a village full of people for an entire season. And they were abundant.
    The Bane Bear thrived within the ice-desert and on the half-frozen waters of the Alarian Ocean where everything from small snow rabbits to huge deep sea bass filled their bellies and kept them reproducing at astounding rates. If the barbarians of Bane could manage to harvest even one a day for the rest of time, they’d be hard pressed to put a dent in their population. As it was, they were lucky to bring one down and process it in a week.
    And it wasn’t just their meat that was valuable either. The bigger bones were fashioned into all manner of things, eating utensils, bowls, platters, art work, even jewelry, while the smaller ones were ground into bone-meal or used in fertilizer for crops farther south.
    The pure white fur of the Bane Bear was the softest material known to mankind, and a coat or coverlet made from it could easily withstand the coldest temperatures found in all of Albrath, even those at the most southern point of the planet, in the village of Vile.
    Talon shuddered, glad he was at this end of the world and not that one. Vile was as it was named, a place