Winter Siege by Ariana Franklin Read Free Book Online Page A

today.’ He reached out to stay her arm but she flinched from him. She would never allow him to touch her; not that he wanted to. Not like that anyway. He was tempted to slap her sometimes for her rudeness; but never would. He had never been one for disciplining children; his wife had complained often enough how he was too soft on young Emouale …
    He shook his head against the memory, lowered his arm and stood in front of her.
    ‘Enough,’ he said patiently. ‘Got to remember that the back is the archer’s friend, got to treat it kindly. Now get inside and see to that stew.’
    She hissed at him and he saw her mouth tense as the familiar guarded look clouded her expression once more. Practising archery was almost the only time when she could forget whatever it was she’d forgotten; when the waves she could hear roaring beyond the sea wall in her mind quietened a little, and she wasn’t swept away in the whirling, filthy, inexplicable terror that filled her dreams. With a bow in her hand she could summon up a hatred and a concentration equalling the deluge that’d otherwise overwhelm her. When she shot, she was no longer powerless.
    Didn’t mind not knowing who she was; didn’t want to. Sufficient to have been delivered a month ago into a ruined church by that old midwife, Gwil, archer and arbalist.
    All she knew for certain was that she was both very young and very old; that she was a girl and yet not female; that she was called Penda because that was the name by which Gwil addressed her but that she once answered to another name which was even now being tossed to and fro like flotsam somewhere on the ocean beyond her mental sea wall – beyond her grasp, beyond his.
    ‘I’m going to have to call you something,’ he’d announced one day. ‘Can’t go around being nameless all your life.’ And then he’d closed his eyes as if lost in thought and when he opened them again he was smiling broadly: ‘Penda,’ he said. ‘That’s what I’ll call you. Pagan warlord Penda was, descended from Woden, or so they say. I think it suits you.’ She’d smiled, although she hadn’t had the slightest idea what he was talking about. On reflection, however, she thought it suited her too. And that’s all she knew, except that she must shoot and shoot, so the point of her arrow could one day thwack into the centre of a human target and inflict a wound on it like the one in the gaping tunnel between her legs.
    There was just one last thing she knew too: that she could trust old Gwil not to come too close. Like he was standing off now, arm outstretched to take the bow.
    She passed it over to him and went into the church to stir the stew, pausing in its arched doorway to peer forward and then behind in case … in case of what? Something terrible.
    No, nobody there. She went inside and felt the uneven walls slip around her like protective clothing. He’d made a safe, warm home of it, old Gwil. Patched the roof, made stools out of its spars, grubbed in the detritus of the cottages and found a pail, scorched but serviceable enough for cooking and washing in, used old bits of iron from the same source to hang on hidden string between the trees so they’d clang an alarm which would give them both time to disappear through a tunnel he’d scratched out under the back wall.
    And he’d made her a cloak out of the hide of a young deer he’d shot when it came blundering through the trees. Bit smelly, but kept out the cold. When she was good enough, he was going to teach her to hunt.
    Goose tonight. When Gwil’d said it was time she did some wildfowling she’d spat at him. That awful sea was out there beyond the trees; she weren’t going to risk it sweeping her off. ‘Bloody won’t. I’m a-staying here.’ Here, where he’d made her safe.
    ‘Stay on your own, then,’ he’d said.
    Hadn’t been so bad, really; something near familiar and reassuring about it. Cold, though, bor. The air that Gwil had expected to warm up by