Read Online Glimpses by Lynn Flewelling - Free Book Online Page B

came riding after her with bows.
    Reaching him, Ireya thrust the swaddled
infant into his arms and gasped, “Leave! Leave, talí!”
    And before he could stop her, she turned and
ran back the way she’d come, arms thrown wide, as if she could stop
the arrows from finding him. Amasa watched in horror as she fell,
then turned and bolted for the narrow pass. All he could see of the
tiny babe in the swaddling was a red little face and eyes as blue
as his own.
     
    ***
     
    Amasa tracked his Hâzadriëlfaie hunter that
summer, and his hunter tracked him. It was only a matter of time
until one of them won the contest.
    The Maker must have known Amasa’s sorrow and
taken pity on him. It was the month of Ireya’s murder when, one
morning just before dawn, he met his pursuer face to face. Amasa
was not helpless and unarmed today, as he had been seven years
ago.
    The Hâzadriëlfaie man was mounted, and
couldn’t get his bow up in time before Amasa shot him through the
lungs. Slumping over his horse’s neck, the man kicked the beast
into a gallop and tried to escape through the trees.
    The blood trail was easily followed for a
tracker like Amasa. He found a bloody bow on the ground at
midmorning, and a discarded pack soon after. Just as the sun tipped
down from noon, he found the man dying on the ground in a small
clearing, horse nowhere in sight.
    Bow drawn, Amasa came closer. The man eyed
him calmly, though he must have known he was looking at his own
death. “You do not understand what you do,” he whispered with the
same accent Ireya had had. His lips were foamed pink with lung
blood, his chin crusted with it. “The child—” More blood bubbled
from the corner of his mouth as he tried to speak. “Cannot be—”
    “The child is,” Amasa growled.
    “More will come—”
    Pain and hatred and old, old sorrow boiled in
Amasa’s heart as he spat in the man’s face, pulled his head back by
the hair, and slit his throat.
    The rest of the day passed in a strange sort
of fog, but when it cleared in the late afternoon he was covered in
blood and a hide very much like a bear’s was nailed to a large
tree, scrapped and brain-tanned. The skinned carcass hung by its
heels from another tree, gathering flies.
     

     
    Let those who would come see that.
     
    ***
     
    Alec was sweeping out the stable yard when
his father appeared at the gate, dressed in new clothing and
thinner than the boy had ever seen him. He had a string of fox and
mink pelts on his belt.
    “Papa!” Alec cried happily, running to him.
“Did the bear get away again?”
    “Not this time, child.”
    “You killed it! Where’s the skin? How much
can we sell it for?”
    “It was no use for selling,” his father
replied. Kneeling in front of him, he held Alec by the shoulders
for a moment and gazed down at him with an expression of such
fondness as Alec had never seen before. Then he saw the tears in
his father’s eyes.
    “What is it, Papa? What’s wrong?” he asked,
alarmed.
    His father smiled. “Nothing, Alec. Not a
thing. Go gather your things. We have traps to set.”
     
     

     
     
     

     
     

By The River
     
    Seregil leaned over the riverbank and
examined the welt swelling across his left cheekbone. Angry eyes
glared back up at him through the red and yellow leaves drifting
past on the current: You’ve failed again. Failed at court. Failed
at wizardry. Failed at the assassin’s craft, failed in your own
birthright...Blood on your hands, but you can’t even make a
dishonest living.
    He dipped his left hand in the water,
blotting out that accusing stare, and held it to his sore cheek.
The old saying was right: hunger was a harsh master and a poor
guide. It had been stupid, trying to pick the purse of a merchant
in a rat hole river town full of thieves, worse even than trying to
cheat those sailors at Isil two days earlier. They’d proven a good
deal more clever than they’d looked, and taken everything he
had—horse, sword, money, cloak,