The Forest Laird by Jack Whyte Read Free Book Online Page A

from time to time, to keep them hunting down there. Besides, she knows how to take care o’ herself.” Ewan took up his knife again and began to strop it against a much-used device that had been lying beside his foot. I looked closely at it, never having seen one quite like it before, a strip of leather, perhaps a foot long and a thumb’s length in width, that he had fastened to a heavy strip of wood. The leather had a patina of long use, its colour darkened almost to blackness by the friction of a lightly oiled blade, and I watched him test the blade’s edge with the ball of his thumb.
    He had no beard. That was part of why he had frightened me so badly when I first looked at him. In a world where all men went unshaven, a beard would have done much to conceal the frightfulness of his visage, yet he had made no attempt to cover the deformity of his face by growing one. If he would wear a mask, why not a beard?
    I had seen beardless men before, but very few, and my father had been the only one I knew personally. As a child, I had watched with fascination as he went to great pains, daily, to scrape his cheeks, chin, and upper lip free of hair, using a thin, short-bladed, and amazingly sharp knife that he kept for that purpose alone. It was hard work to shave a beard, I knew, a meticulous and time-consuming, seemingly pointless task, except that my father’s commitment to it had a purpose that I discovered by accident one day, listening to my mother speaking to a friend. My father, she had said, had an affliction of the skin that he could hold at bay only by shaving daily. He might perhaps miss one day, but three successive days without the blade would bring his face out in boils and scaly patches. I never did discover what this malady sprang from, but from that time onward I accepted my father’s daily regimen as necessary. Watching Ewan wield his strange bluish knife, I knew his blade was far sharper than my father’s, and that he could use it to shave quite easily. Yet there was a smoothness to his skin that showed no sign at all of being scraped.
    “Ewan, why have you no beard?”
    He looked at me in surprise, then laughed. “For the same reason I have no eyebrows. I can’t grow one.”
    I gaped at him in astonishment, noticing for the first time that it was as he said. He had brows, the undamaged one boldly pronounced, but they were hairless.
    He laughed again. “I was born bald, young Jamie. And I have never grown a single hair anywhere on my body. Look.”
    He stretched out a hand towards me, exposing the skin on his forearm. It was perfectly smooth, tanned, and heavily corded with muscle but innocent of any trace of hair.
    “No hair at all?” I asked.
    “Not a single strand. That’s another reason for the mask, and the hood. My bare head makes me too easy to notice. Folk will remember a hooded, masked outlaw, but they won’t be able to describe him. But a bald and beardless man is another matter altogether.”
    My mind raced to absorb what he had said. “Did you not wear a hood, then, before you were an outlaw?”
    “No, why would I? I didna need one. I had no reason to fear people knowing who I was. I had nothing to hide and nothing to protect. But that’s all different now. And what about you two? Where will you go next?”
    “I don’t know,” Will said quietly. He had been listening closely to our conversation. “I think we ought to go and see the Countess.”
    “The Countess ? In Kyle? That’s back where you came from, thirty miles away. How will you get there? And what will you do when you are there? Have you other kin close by?”
    “No. There was only us, and Jamie’s folk in Auchincruive, but they’re all dead, too. I ha’e two brothers, but Malcolm’s training to be knighted and John was knighted two years ago and they’re both with the Bruce forces, somewhere in Annandale. I don’t know how to find them, to let them know what’s happened. But they’ll ha’e to be told. But that