Read Online Firebrand by Gillian Philip - Free Book Online

want to give my position away because I didn’t want my head on a fence spike. I looked back at the crofter’s face again, knowing from his expression he hadn’t died well. I suppose the other body parts scattered round the yard were his lover, but I had to count to make sure. The gods knew where her head was.
    What was the point of being a wild thing if you couldn’t listen to your wildest instincts? I stopped then, right in the centre of the blood-boltered yard, and listened, really listened. Dusk was well advanced now, the day only a strip of pearl above the horizon, so I could forget my eyes. I forgot my mind too, forgot my crazy fears and conjectures, and let myself smell and feel the battle. I let myself hear it, hear it properly. That wasn’t hard, because it was drawing closer. But it could only be drawing nearer to here if my father was in retreat.
    Now I could hear individual voices, individual screams and howls and yells among the clangour and screech of metal against metal. There were some voices I recognised, and those were the ones panicked by defeat. There were some I did not. Those were the voices raised high in vicious war cries.
    I ran.
    The trouble was, I didn’t run far enough and I didn’t run in the right direction. My instincts had had their moment, and now I lost it as panic swept over me. I ran towards a copse of windblown pines, and knew it was a death trap. I ran back the way I had come, and knew suddenly that on the open moor I’d be exposed for miles, and my enemy was on horseback. So for hideous seconds and minutes, fear turning my muscles to ice and my innards to water, I stood in the centre of the ravaged cottages and their destroyed inhabitants, and I could not move.
    I don’t know what made me run to the well. It was a place to be cornered and caught, but it was a place to hide, too. I could feel minds hunting other minds, but I was better at blocking now. If I blocked Kilrevin’s searching mind long enough, Conal would find me. Of course he would. He’d come for me. He’d said he would.
    But I couldn’t call out to him, even in this rout. The battle was on me, now, the noise of it numbing my ears and dazing my brain, and I didn’t dare look back as I stumbled down the treacherous stone steps cut into the slope. Below, in total darkness, I could see the maw of the well, no longer welcoming but ready to swallow me whole. I was terrified of pitching forward into the black glistening water, and more terrified of not getting down there fast enough. I grabbed for the wall, scraping my palm, almost losing my balance and then sinking up to one ankle in coldness. For an instant I froze in terror, but the shouts were louder now, theclang of steel more vicious, the grunts and howls of dying men clearer. Gripping a ridge of rough stone with my fingertips, I swung myself round and backed against the unseen inner wall. I was up to my thighs in water but I didn’t care that the cold bit into my flesh like the teeth of the underworld.
    Men were fighting their way down the steps after me: two of them. Edging further along the wall into deeper darkness, I saw flames flicker on the black surface, but as the tiny waves I made rippled wider, the flame-light briefly sputtered and went out. I tried to breathe without a sound, but it was hard.
    Then that problem was solved, because I stopped breathing. There was the hideous ring of steel, the laboured hissing breath of men intent only on killing one another. One staggered back; I heard his sword scrape on the stone close to me. The steel-clangour echoed now from the stone roof: the men were inside the well-cavern. The first one grunted as he fended off a blow, and I knew it was my father.
    If it had been Conal I’d have gone to help him, I swear I would. But he wasn’t Conal, and I barely knew my father, and the stark truth is, I was rigid with terror. All I did was watch as the reflected flames flared again and Alasdair Kilrevin beat my father back