Read Online Fell (The Sight 2) by David Clement-Davies - Free Book Online

up a piece of rag and started to wipe her hands, and Alina went icy cold, as she saw that Ranna’s wrinkled old hands were covered in blood. Mia had noticed it too and begun to shake.
    “A stroke of genius though—Bogdan,” said Malduk.
    Ranna’s eyes narrowed like a crow’s, and Alina wondered why Malduk was talking about the shepherd Bogdan. What had they done?
    “Such a filthy, black night to be out, husband,” Ranna growled. “I’ll make you some broth, while you clean yourself up.”
    “Good, woman. My feet are cold enough to freeze brandy.”
    Ranna walked towards the kitchen, as the children huddled in terror in the shadows.
    “I still say you should have done for her there in the snows,” she said, “and saved me all this bother.”
    Malduk sat down on the chest. He was suddenly remembering that strange morning, seven years before, when he had been walking in the mountains and stumbled on the soldier and girl in the gully, next to their dead horse. From the rockfall around them, he had realised immediately that the animal must have slipped and sent them both over the edge, killing the soldier and the horse and knocking Alina unconscious. As the little girl had lain there, he had tried to rouse her, and when she had finally opened her eyes, he had asked her who she was.
    “Alina, I think” was all she had managed to say, before she swooned again.
    Then the old shepherd had searched the soldier’s body and found that heavy bag of gold and Vladeran’s parchment. He had taken ages to decipher the strange words written there, but at last he had realised that it was the man’s letter of instruction, his orders to take the little girl far away in secret, and murder her.
    “We shouldn’t have meddled in her fate,” said Ranna in the hovel.
    “Perhaps I was getting soft in my old age,” said Malduk, with a half chuckle, surprising himself with the thought. “And she would have been taken soon enough with the fury of that winter, it’s true. She was frightened out of her wits as it was when she woke fully. Kept mumbling that she was sorry. About what I’ve still no idea.”
    “She’s a weak nature, that’s why, even for a feeble girl.”
    In her own childhood old Ranna had wanted to be a boy, and she had been furiously jealous of her brothers and the freedom they had around the home.
    “No doubt, Ranna,” grunted Malduk, “but it was when she was lying there in the snow that I …”
    “Took pity on her,” hissed Ranna scornfully. “Why, husband? There’s no pity in the wild. No pity for poor shepherds, neither.”
    “Then I had the idea, proper, to steal the soldier’s gold, and get us a servant into the bargain.”
    Malduk was hiding his old pain too though, his longing for a son of his own. For a time the old witch’s plan to conceal Alina with strange stories of changelings had even made him feel he had been given one by magic. But that had faded.
    “But when it’s finally over, at least I won’t have to make the witch’s brew again, to make her forget,” said Ranna, holding up her little bundle of herbs. “She won’t have anything to forget at all, let alone the lie that this ever protected her from the fairies. Stupid child.”
    When the old witch on the mountain had first given Alina Sculcuvant the herb soup to protect her from the goblins, she had whispered strange words to her too, as she looked deep into her little eyes, winking at Malduk over her shoulder. A spell, Malduk and Ranna called it, and they had paid the witch handsomely in mutton for her magic, as they had for the tale she had brewed up too. But the power, which men in later days would come to call hypnotism, helped by those potent herbs, had not been hard for the old woman to conjure. Not with the state Alina had been in. Post-traumatic amnesia it would be called, in the far distant days when science would learn to name everything.
    Ranna and Malduk both laughed, and Mia swung her head to Alina again, her eyes