Read Online Lost Covenant: A Widdershins Adventure by Ari Marmell - Free Book Online Page B

backhand; the woman's other fist drove hard into the courier's stomach, sending her to all fours, retching a sour-smelling sludge tinged pink with blood.
    Robin's horrified scream had barely begun to emerge, little more than a piercing squeak, when the woman was on her as well. Steel glinted in her fist, reflecting the early moonlight from the snow, and Robin recognized Faustine's own dagger in the instant before it vanished from her line of sight, pressed against her throat.
    Red. It was the strangest observation for her to make at the time, but a lock of the woman's hair had slipped from her hood; it was red.
    And her eyes shone far too wide, and too white.
    “I could just kill you,” she hissed, breath warm against Robin's face. “That'd be nice and agonizing. But it's not exactly clear, is it? I mean, so many people could just kill you….”
    A smile, now, as white as those eyes in the blackness of the hood.
    “The gunshot's probably attracted attention,” she said, “and your friend there might be able to stand in another few minutes. If you're lucky, little worm, you won't bleed to death.”
    “Wh-what…?”
    Fingers clenched in ragged brown hair, yanking the girl back and off-balance…and the cloaked woman plunged Faustine's dagger, hilt deep, into Robin's upper thigh.
    Agony, like nothing she'd known, nothing she'd imagined; a thick and somehow-viscous nausea at the sight of the blood pumping from the wound, at the slick feel of the steel inside her flesh. She didn't remember collapsing to the snow, which swiftly grew crimson around her; didn't remember clutching, flailing madly, at her leg; didn't recognize the sound that stabbed at her ears and throat as her own voice.
    “Yes…” the woman murmured almost sensually, sliding back into the darkness. “I'm pretty sure she'll understand that ….”
    Flashes of red and white: smears flashed across her vision, or blood and snow?
    She saw Faustine dragging herself toward her, mouth agape in horror, reaching…
    And then the pain, mercifully, began to fade. Consciousness fading, Robin found herself wondering, with disturbing calm, whether she would wake up again or not. And what she —what Widdershins—might think if she didn't.

Hooves pounded divots into cold-hardened soil; great flanks heaved and sweated beneath saddles of ornate leather. Cyrille Delacroix leaned forward, nearly standing in the stirrups, relishing in the feel of the chill air over his face even as he prayed to Cevora and the rest of the Pact that they might arrive before too much ground had been lost.
    Mother hadn't wanted to send him out, to lead the quartet of household armsmen riding in a cluster around him, that much he knew. He was “too inexperienced.” “Too hotheaded.” “Too unreliable.” “Too young.” Plus a wide variety of other too s he'd heard from Mother and his older siblings more times than he could count. But none of them had been available, had they? When the field hand had come running into the main house at dusk, bellowing about another “cursed blight,” he'd been the only one of the Delacroix scions unoccupied elsewhere. And given how little they yet understood about these spreading pools of rot, and how many their fields had already suffered, Mother wasn't about to trust this outing to servants alone.
    Well, good! This was his opportunity to prove his mettle, to stand equal to his brothers and sisters (well, most of his brothers and sisters) in the matriarch's esteem. He could only imagine the dashing figure he must cut; russet destrier galloping under him, his navy coat and night-black hair sweeping behind him, custom-fitted cuirass—unsullied, as yet, by any genuine use—gleaming beneath the gibbous moon. It was straight out of a storybook, or at least he imagined it to be. He glanced southeast, hoping for the silhouette of old Castle Pauvril against the stars and sky—it would've completed the illustrationperfectly—but alas, the night proved too