The Traitor's Heir by Anna Thayer Read Free Book Online

even be guilty; what proof was there against Telo? A cut on his arm, a man who knew his name… But the more Eamon thought about it, the more certain the innkeeper’s crime became.
    Before Eamon knew it, he was in the square with a dozen other new ensigns, his hands helping to build the place where Aeryn’s father would be burned alive.

C HAPTER III
    T he kindling swiftly piled high, and men and women from the town began to gather in the shadowy corners of the square. They could not come too close; the Gauntlet needed room to work.
    Eamon felt the weight of the wood in his hands as he and a dozen other ensigns built the pyre. They worked in silence, and for a moment he was able to pretend that it was just an exercise, that the dry wood would not be lit.
    But torches lit up the square and two tall stakes had been set at the centre of the pyre. The Gauntlet’s work that evening was precise, diligent. All the grim totems lacked were their offerings.
    As the kindling went higher Eamon felt a churning sickness deep in his gut. He had been to public burnings and executions before but he had never felt as he did now: wretched, trapped, desperate. It was Telo whom they meant to burn, and Telo was a wayfarer.
    Death to the snakes! His mind was filled with cries from long ago. Death to the snakes!
    His mind’s eye opened in the cold, grey streets of Dunthruik, and though the streets seemed faint and dim to his memory the cries were not, and neither was the feel of his mother’s hands on his own. He vividly remembered the group of men that had been jeered towards the city’s heart. The crowd had called them snakes and wayfarers, enemies of the Master deserving of death. The condemned men had been pelted with stones as they were taken through the streets until they bled and staggered. Eamon remembered the crowd’s rage and the man falling in a swamp of hail and blood.
    Ceremonial pyres, much like the ones he now had a hand in building, stood high that day. The men had been bound and the kindling set alight while the whole city exulted in the flames that snatched about the Master’s enemies.
    His mother’s hands turned his face towards her so that he could not watch; he had heard her heart beating fast. He could still recall the soft touch of his father, smoothing his hair and caressing his brow as he had trembled with fear. And the smell: the charred, gruesome smell of burning flesh. The men and women of the city baying for blood and rejoicing in the screams. His ear burned with that moaning, stifled only slightly by the great knots of his mother’s cloak that he forced into his ears. It had been the time of the great culls. He had been nine years old.
    Death to the snakes!
    Tears stung at his eyes but still his hands moved. They moved until his task was done.
    â€œGood work, Goodman.” Barns’s voice struck him; looking up he saw that a ring of Gauntlet ensigns was forming up about the central part of the square. These soldiers had the double task of keeping back the onlookers and keeping the prisoners from fleeing should they somehow escape the flames.
    Eamon did not form part of that line; he followed Barns as more experienced ensigns hustled them out of the ring and into the crowd. Eamon knew the drill: Gauntlet men were always stationed among the masses to keep them calm in what followed. In a daze, Eamon took his place in the pressing throng. Barns moved farther on.
    Belaal and a group of lieutenants and ensigns came through the square in procession. Belaal marched proudly at the head of the line, leading his bedraggled, grim-faced prisoners as though he had won them by noble endeavour. A drummer, one of the college’s youngest cadets, marched by the captain’s side. With each stroke that he beat, the crowds of men and women lurched forward eagerly; some beat their hands along with it. Some spat at the passing prisoners. All jeered them.
    â€œDeath to the snakes!”