Weatherwitch: Book Three of The Crowthistle Chronicles by Cecilia Dart-Thornton Read Free Book Online Page A

believe his father was inherently numb to her passions. In later years, as he approached maturity of understanding, the prince had come to conjecture that just
possibly
his father had been blind in another way entirely, and that he himself had also been taken in. For it occurred to him, from a casual word dropped here and there, that his mother had actually
engineered
Kieran’s sojourn in Grïmnørsland. She never admitted to it, and he never quizzed her, but he knew full well that she looked with satisfaction on the years his elder brother had spent in the western kingdom, quietly pleasedthat at least one of her sons had, for a time, escaped what she considered to be a stifling atmosphere, and a hotbed of machinations and base influences: the court of Slievmordhu.
    Beneath the rustling elms Ronin spoke gently to the agitated queen, as if in apology. “Father means well, Mother,” he said. “He has taught us the value of honesty and openness; he has instructed us to be loyal, and never to lie to him, wherefore we have grown up to be honorable men.”
    Saibh nodded. She swallowed her queasiness and managed to smile wanly. “Indeed you have both grown to be men of principle,” she said, “and loving sons also. Some day you will make fine husbands.” To Kieran she said, “Solveig Torkilsalven will be a happy wife.”
    But Ronin, asleep in the hunting lodge thought of his brother’s promised bride with a pang of love and longing. Sweetened by an image of her pretty face in a cloud of golden hair, his visions faded into slumber.

    In Grïmnørsland a band of Marauders lay dead, but far away on the other side of the Four Kingdoms, the main clan thrived. The Great Eastern Ranges, which separated Slievmordhu from the uninhabited South Eastern Moors, were perforated with a complexity of excavations and natural warrens. Many of these caverns sheltered groups of human creatures loosely connected by amorphous and slippery social bonds. Supernatural wights were scarce in the Eastern Ranges, and seldom troubled those cave-dwellers. Human they were, these troglodytes, but bizarre and un-human in aspect.
    Marauders were outcasts. Their ancestors had been outlaws and misfits seeking secret places to hide, using them as bases from which they could launch surprise raids on the law-abiding citizens of the Four Kingdoms. As years passed, the descendants of the original population became altered in appearance and personality, growing ever more bellicose, brutish and fierce. Why this should be so was not certain, but it was said that some vile poison, or unseelie force, or toxic gas, slow-simmered beneath the mountains in that region, and it was further reckoned that this mysterious influence seeped gradually into the flesh and bones of those who dwelled in the caverns, twisting them, misshaping their offspring, until the population came to resemble nightmares rather than ordinary humankind. Some of them had grown unusually gigantic of height and breadth, and as strong as oxen or draught-horses. Although the alterations made them as hideous as themost repulsive of eldritch wights, the Marauders remained human, and possessed not a whiff of supernatural power or immortality.
    In the Main Cave of a network of interconnected ventricles infested by a loose-knit clan, or comswarm, that frequently, but not invariably, called itself “The Sons of Blerg,” two Marauder captains were planning their next foraging foray into the countryside. The cavern, although draughty, cold, damp and bereft of creature comforts, teemed with men and youths. Unwashed, clad in an assortment of filthy animal skins and stolen finery, they squatted around small fires playing at knucklebones, sharpening weapons, picking their remaining teeth or multiple rows of fangs, or brooding in sullen silence. Smoke collected in suffocating billows beneath the high ceilings. Now and then an unexpected gust of wind from some rocky orifice would send the fumes blasting down to the