Read Online Gods and Warriors by Michelle Paver - Free Book Online

reveal her breasts, and at her neck she wore a collar of blood-red stones the size of pigeons’ eggs. Her ankle-length skirt was a Sea of overlapping waves of purple and blue, spangled with tiny glittering fish like little bits of Sun. Golden too were the snakes entwining her arms and her crinkly black hair. Her pointed fingernails were yellow as the claws of hawks, and her haughty face was painted stark white.
    Even from twenty paces, Hylas felt her power. Now what? To steal from a priestess would be the worst thing he could do. Who knew what curses she might send after him?
    A slave handed her a stone bowl so thin it seemed filled with light. Chanting in her strange clicking tongue, she flicked wine on the fire, then moved to the shallows and cast gobbets of fat upon the waves. The offering over, hermen settled down to eat, but she stayed at the water’s edge, staring out to Sea.
    A crow swooped for a scrap of fat from the shallows, then glided past her. She watched it intently. Hylas had a horrible feeling that it was the same crow he’d seen earlier, and that it was telling her about him.
    Sure enough, she turned to face his hiding place. He froze. Her dark gaze swept toward him. He felt the power of her will. He fought the urge to jump to his feet and give himself up.
    At that moment a girl burst from the tent and shouted something furious in Keftian.
    All heads turned. Hylas breathed out. The eye of the priestess was averted.
    The girl had the same dark eyes and crinkly hair, and he guessed they were mother and daughter; but if the priestess resembled a handsome hawk, her daughter was a scrawny young fledgling. She wore a purple tunic spangled with tiny golden bees, and a thunderous scowl. As she stalked across the pebbles she snarled incomprehensibly at her mother.
    With a word and a chopping motion of her palm, the priestess cut her short. The girl stood seething with her shoulders up around her ears. The priestess turned back to the Sea. The girl was defeated.
    A young man—a slave?—approached the girl and touched her arm, but she shook him off. The young man didn’t look Keftian; Hylas didn’t know
what
he was. Hisskin was reddish brown and his eyes were rimmed with black. He wore a kilt of unbleached linen, and the amulet on his chest was a single staring eye. Like the Keftians, he had no beard; but even stranger than that, his smooth brown head was bald.
    Again he touched the girl’s arm and gestured to the tent. The fight went out of her and she followed him.
    The wine had its effect and the camp grew noisy; men stumbled into the pinewoods, then back to the fire. The Moon rose. At last things began to quiet down, and the tents went dark. A single guard remained by the fire. Soon he too was snoring.
    Holding his breath, Hylas crept past the tents and ducked behind a boulder a few paces from the fire. Now for the dangerous bit: the pebbly shore. He wished the moonlight wasn’t so bright.
    He was about to make his move when a shadowy figure slipped from the priestess’s tent and stole toward him. In consternation he recognized the girl.
    Go away,
he snarled at her in his head.
    For one heart-stopping moment she passed so close that he heard the clink of her bracelets. She didn’t see him. When she reached the fire she halted and stood scowling down at it. Her fists were clenched, her body taut as a bowstring.
    What does she have to scowl about? thought Hylas. Somewhere in the mountains, Issi was battling to survive—and here was this rich girl who had
everything
: slaves,warm clothes, all the meat she could eat. What more could she possibly want?
    Suddenly the girl snatched a stick from the fire. She blew on its tip to make it glow red. She stared at it with alarming intensity, her bony chest rising and falling. Hylas saw that the spangles on her tunic weren’t bees, as he’d thought, but tiny double axes. Still she went on staring at the stick. He wondered if she was mad.
    Suddenly she sucked in her