Winter Siege by Ariana Franklin Read Free Book Online Page B

now was icier than ever once they left the shelter of the trees.
    Crouching with their backs to the great expanse of reeds that troubled her, they’d waited for dawn and the honking, whistling, fluting air-borne invasion that came in with it out of the North Sea, displacing the air with a hundred thousand beating wings. Arrows speeding up from her bow hadn’t been loosed in hatred this time, more with wonder at the magic of flight and the need to bring some of it down to the cumbersome, featherless humans below.
    Dead bodies had plopped about them, one with an arrow of hers in it. ‘Mine,’ she’d swanked as they picked them up, although she’d been bound to hit something, the sky being so thick with birds. ‘We’ll have this un for supper.’
    ‘Long as you pluck it,’ Gwil had said.
    Which she had, unsurprised by the ease with which she did it, and the instinctive knowledge that, when she’d set it to simmer, a leaf or two of sage and a couple of wild garlic bulbs ought to go in with it. She could remember enough.
    ‘Could do with some bread,’ she grumbled as she poured it out on the wooden platters he’d made.
    ‘Come spring,’ he said, ‘when we go to Cambridge.’
    She began whimpering. ‘Don’t want to go to Cambridge, Gwil. I want to stay here.’
    He knew she was terrified of going outside this deserted village; she’d only come wildfowling – they’d needed something other than squirrels to eat – because she was equally frightened of being by herself.
    But they couldn’t stay here; when the weather improved the village’s former residents might come to rebuild or carry off the church’s stone. It was lucky this long-drawn-out winter still hampered people’s movements and had given her the solitude in which to recover – as much as she could recover.
    It was strange, Gwil thought; she knew which call came from which bird and could tell one herb from another, but she didn’t know her own name. She had no memory of what was personal to her, yet with common tasks, like cooking, like laundering, she retained the lessons somebody had taught her.
    She was sitting on the other side of the fire – she always kept it between them – gracelessly stuffing food into her mouth as if it was a chore, her small freckled face displaying no pleasure in what was a good stew.
    She doesn’t show pleasure in anything, Gwil thought, except …
    He waited until she’d licked the platter, then he said: ‘We’ll get me another crossbow in Cambridge,’ and watched her come alive, as she always did when the subject was shooting.
    From the moment she’d seen him practising with the ordinary bow he’d made for himself, she’d nagged and nagged until he carved and strung one for her.
    The way she’d handled it told him she came from a wildfowling family, though few wildfowlers possessed the potential she did; oh, he’d spotted that sure enough, the fury that launched itself with the arrow as if from the same bowstring had shocked him, at first making him wonder whether, in that strange little head of hers, she remembered more of her ordeal than she realized. She stood differently, too, with a bow in her hand: confident, more upright and, from the very first time she held one, he had seen that she had the makings of an exceptional archer.
    Not that he told her so; when she was shooting her fear gave way to an arrogance that could lead to self-satisfaction – the ruin of many an archer who had stopped practising because of it.
    ‘And me,’ she said now, ‘I want a crossbow.’
    ‘No.’
    ‘Why?’
    ‘Can’t afford two.’
    He began telling her how much expense and preparation went into the making of a first-class crossbow; how the best prods (the bow itself) were laminated, and how the glue for that came from the shredded tendons of an ox’s heel soaked for days to soften it. He explained how its heavier draw weight necessitated using a leather stirrup to pull back the string (usually hemp); how its