Read Online Dragon Heart by Cecelia Holland - Free Book Online

road he followed was hardly more than a goat track, pounded deep into the ground, rushing with the runoff of the storm, and on all the brush around him the flowers were opening. He saw no travelers, no goats or cattle, only wild things, the bees in the flowers, the birds in the sky.
    After a hundred miles following along the foot of the mountains the road dropped down again to the coast and he went west along the shelving beach. Sea cattle flopped and barked on the offshore rocks, and the surf broke over long black reefs like rows of teeth, gashing the constant white slosh of the waves. Above the high-tide line the wind had blown the sand up into billowing dunes. Grey bones of driftwood poked up out of the matted seaweed and shells that covered the wave slope. A flock of seagulls clamored into the air as he came, rising away from a half-eaten seal carcass. The tide was coming in. Out to sea, another storm blurred the western horizon.
    Where a stream ran down into the sea and its banks made a wide, sheltered place, he came on a fishing village too small to have a name. He stopped to water his horse at the well.
    He wondered what he should do next—where else he could look for her. He was running out of food and he was tired of sleeping on the ground. He might never find her. He might never go home again but wander, always, looking for her. The four little huts of the village were quiet, everybody gone, only a few old people sleeping in the sun. He had to ask someone, and he was thinking of waking one of these elders when two boys ran into the common around the well, shouting.
    â€œThey’ve caught the witch. Come on!”
    He reached his horse in a single step, bounded into the saddle, and galloped inland, back the way the boys had come, up the stream; he heard screaming and shouts ahead. Thickets of willow and brambles closed down around him, but the path was deep and wide and he followed the racket ahead of him. People were running after him from the village—the two boys, the elders.
    â€œBurn the witch!”
    Up ahead the trail came out on a clearing. At the stream bank an enormous old tree rose, something dark huddled in its branches. Beneath the leafy crown several people stood, shouting up, and one cocked his arm back and threw a rock. Another was poking a rake into the branches and two women in aprons were heaping brush against the trunk of the tree. On the path right in front of Jeon, another man knelt in the dust, lighting a torch with his tinderbox.
    Jeon charged his horse straight over the man with the tinderbox, knocking him flat, and rushed the mob under the tree. There were six or seven of them, all on foot. Jeon had no time to draw his sword and anyway he was no good with a sword, but he was good with a horse. He ran down one woman, wheeled the horse around on its hocks, and chased another, who ran shrieking out toward the path. Now he managed to get his sword out of the sheath. Under the tree the man with the rake was set, ready to fight, and beside him another man flung a rock, but when Jeon launched the horse at them, the sword high, they whirled and fled. All the others were already running. The horse was enjoying this and fought against stopping, and when Jeon wrestled it down by the tree it reared and neighed and clashed the air with its hooves.
    â€œTirza!” Jeon shouted. He backed the snorting horse underneath the branches.
    She slid down out of the tree to the ground. She was filthy, her hair matted and full of burrs and leaves, her face black with dirt, out of which her blue eyes shone startlingly clear and bright. He ran his sword back into its sheath. The villagers stood around them at a good distance, wary. A surge of power filled him. He had saved his sister. He glared around him at the crowd, suddenly longing for them to jump forward and take him on. None of them moved. He reached down his arm for her, drew her up behind him on the horse, and rode