Read Online Freya the Huntress (Europa #2: A Dark Fantasy) by Joseph Robert Lewis - Free Book Online

ahead. That’s quite the riddle, lord. I suppose I should have made it more clear in my prayers that I’m not as fond of riddles as you are.” The vala apprentice quickened her pace to catch up to Erik. “But I’ll do my best to unravel this one. Just don’t let me die before I do.”
    Freya and Erik exchanged a silent smile.
    They left Hengavik and its grassy fields and followed the old ridge road up west. The smoking peak of Mount Esja glowered down at them from the distant north, its lower slopes gleaming snow-white and blue against the pale sky. They were less than an hour on the road before Erik said he could smell the salty sea air. Freya smelled the change in the air as well, but whether it was the sea she could not tell. Something else, something foul, lingered in the hills.
    Dark clouds gathered in the west, shrouding the sky and rumbling with the first angry hints of the storm to come. Freya minded the road, scanning for fresh tracks of men, or mules, or sheep. But the only tracks she could identify were fox prints, and they were all far too large. Erik moved on ahead, a hundred paces or more, always cresting the next hill long before the women and Arfast did, and each time he would wave the all-clear sign.
    It was nearing noon, with the sun shining weakly on the shrubby hills patched with ice, when Erik reached the top of a hill, dropped to one knee, and raised his fist. Freya pulled the white elk to a halt and told Wren to stay put, and then the huntress jogged up the road to her husband’s side. He pointed to the northwest.
    A bright warble of cold water ran down from the skirts of Mount Esja and raced in its narrow channel down through the hills, and not far from their hilltop Freya could see a small water mill standing beside the swift stream. The mill sat half-buried in the bank beside the water, roofed in turf that would hide the building from any travelers on its northern side, but to the south it presented a crooked stone face with a crooked, curtained doorway. Its three water wheels spun steadily in the water, each one a cleverly lashed arrangement of ribs and femurs with oiled leather sheets stretched tightly over the paddles to catch the water.
    “It’s still working? Why the hell would anyone need a mill where all the farmers are dead?” Freya asked.
    “Look again,” Erik signed. “Most of the paddles have rotted away. The bones are just spinning loose. And there used to be more than three, but the others are gone.”
    Freya nodded, trusting her husband’s keen eyes over her own. He’d always had stronger vision and sharper ears, even before his injury, before he was excluded from the world of conversation and found himself simply listening and watching, year after year, until Freya and Katja had helped him learn to speak with his hands.
    “It’s not far,” Freya said. “We should take a look inside. There might be food.”
    “Really?” Erik raised an eyebrow.
    “Maybe in a cellar buried along the bank, something forgotten when the people left, or ignored when the reavers came.”
    They followed the road a bit farther and then struck out along an overgrown footpath down a gentle slope through tall grasses and crunching snow to the edge of the stream across from the mill. Thin plates of ice clung to the banks, floating on the silver ripples of the stream. The water wheels were indeed broken and rotting, still turning in the water but no longer able to turn anything inside the mill.
    Freya leapt across the water and quietly dashed to the roof of the mill where she searched for tracks and signs. The ground above and behind the mill was wild and unmarked, but at the edge of the stream where the earth was softer, she saw the footprints leading to the door of the mill. She pointed at them and Erik nodded. They were boot prints. And they were fresh.
    “Hello?” Freya circled around the mound of the buried mill and approached the muddy bank where the door faced the water and the broken