Read Online The Book of the Sword (Darkest Age) by A. J. Lake - Free Book Online Page B

trying to twist away from the fat man’s grasp, and felt her feet slide out from under her. She flailed for balance, lost it and came down hard on the ice, the breath knocked out of her. A thump and a volley of curses nearby told her that the fat man had fallen with her, but the other two were bending over her, laughing. Rage filled her, and the sword flared in her hand.
    She had time to see the expression in her attackers’ eyes – shock, then terror – before the ground shifted under her. There was a dreadful creaking, a panicked cry from the man on theground behind her, and then she was sliding helplessly downwards, plummeting down a shard of steeply sloping ice straight into the lake. Commotion rose all around her: screams, splashing and running footsteps. Then she was in icy water, and all sound stopped as the blackness closed over her head.
    She was sinking into darkness, all light and motion fading above her. There was no air left in her: next moment she must take the ice water into her lungs … And then her father’s voice came to her, from the days when she was small and safe, when water had been her friend:
Kick, Elspeth! Kick at it and the water will let you go the way you want. Use your arms to point the way
.
    Elspeth kicked hard, casting her eyes upwards. Her arms were above her head, and over them was a greenish light … the sword! It still glowed, and it was pointing the way to safety. She clamped her lips shut: she
would
reach the surface …
    Something brushed against her. She ignored it, straining upwards, but there was another touch, and then another, twining around her legs. They were all about her: the slender, translucent figures she had seen before: insubstantial but clinging; swarming up her body towards the surface … or else pulling her down. And a hundred soft voices sounded in her ears:
Ioneth … Ioneth!
    Let me go!
Elspeth could not tell if it was her voice that spoke or the sword’s, but her lips were still pressed together, though her lungs were on fire. Was it growing lighter aboveher? The whispering in her ears had become an indistinct roaring, and her body was melting with the ice.
    Something wrenched painfully at her wrist. Her hair was being pulled out of her head. There was a violent yank upwards – and she was out in the blessed air, blinking in the red remains of the light, trying to breathe and coughing instead, and clinging for her life to the rough wool of Cathbar’s jerkin.
    ‘I’ve got you, girl,’ he muttered. ‘Try and stand for me now, will you? We need to get moving, fast.’
    His words made no sense to her at first. She was not drowned – surely that was enough? Could she not just lie here while her body came back to her? But then she heard the other sounds, and began to see again. Edmund was standing over her, clutching his knife and looking hunted. Fritha stood nearby, an arrow fitted to her bow. Elspeth followed their gaze to see the fat man who had grabbed her lying flat on his back in the snow, wheezing and dripping wet. He must have gone through the ice as well, and his companion, the tall fisherman who had first threatened her, had only just succeeded in pulling him out. He was crouching over the fat man, very nearly as wet as he was, clutching a sodden cloak around himself and cursing at Elspeth through violently chattering teeth. And along the edge of the lake Olafr, abruptly sobered by the look of it, was leading a band of grim-faced fishermen towards them. Most of them had gutting-knives like his, and one or two had drawn them.
    ‘Can you walk?’ Cathbar asked her again. His voice was level, but there was an edge to it that Elspeth had not heard before.
    An angry mutter came to her from the approaching men. She heard the word
galdra-kona
, witch, spoken in voices of anger and fear. And then Olafr’s voice, shrill with fury.
    ‘She broke the ice and pushed him in!’
    ‘We’ll see if she can drown, then,’ cried another man.
    ‘If not,