Read Online The Gathandrian Trilogy 02 - Hallsfoots Battle by Anne Brooke - Free Book Online

was time to take up the cloak of leadership the Elders had bequeathed to her. She was no longer protecting a sick man and waiting for an absent one. She was in charge of a small band looking to her for guidance. However, before squaring her shoulders and opening her mouth, Annyeke couldn’t help glancing at Johan. He smiled briefly at her, but his eyes were bleak.
    She turned away.
    “What I think we should do is this,” she said and then, before she fully understood it, everything became clear. “We need to prepare for the battle Gelahn will bring upon us. That much is obvious. To do that, we need strength, both mental and physical. Because, without the mind-cane, Gelahn’s mental power will be weaker, and he must compensate for that elsewhere. The only action he can take—the action I’d take—is to fight with a combination of both. He’ll do anything to get his power back. Here, in Gathandria, he spent so long without it.”
    “In the Elders’ prison, you mean?” Johan interrupted, a frown on his handsome face.
    She nodded. The knowledge of the cage in the Underground Library, the books and all she had discovered from them swept over her once more—Gelahn’s attempt at power, his imprisonment, the Elders’ cruelty and how they had allowed him to escape. And why. There in her home she opened her mind to them and finally told the full story of what she had found and what it had meant to them all, even Talus, though for her young charge she threaded her mind-words with comfort. The harshness of some acts should only be truly felt by the adult world.
    When she’d finished, the mind-cane began to hum and the raven hopped elegantly off the table, its wounds even now beginning to vanish, and half flew to stand next to the cane, though not too near. The humming faded to nothing.
    “I hadn’t known the depths and depravity of it,” Johan whispered, and she could hear the shock and grief in his voice, the same feelings she had experienced at first seeing Gelahn’s prison.
    “I know. I’m sorry,” she replied, once again laying her fingers on his arm for a moment or two. The touch of him warmed her and she let him go before he could realise it.
    Simon gave her a sharp glance and a brief smile before speaking. “So he’s more like me than we thought?”
    “How so?” This from Johan as he took two or three paces towards the scribe. Annyeke winced as he stepped onto one of her already broken dishes. It cracked into unsalvageable pieces. “You are nothing like the mind-executioner. Nothing at all!”
    The raven unfurled his wings and hissed at Johan. The mind-cane began to tremble.
    The scribe moved quickly to put himself between them and Johan. “You think so? Well, perhaps the fact I’m only half Gathandrian gives me a different point of view. Your Elders release Gelahn in order to bring things to a conclusion. Unfortunately, what they get is a ruined city, destroyed neighbours…and me. And I’ve done nobody any good so far, so all I can think is they must have been wrong in their assumptions about us both. Not only that but, as far as I can see, the mind-executioner has been driven by pain to take up the course of life he’s chosen. When I was with Ralph Tregannon, was I really that different? And, if so, how exactly?”
    The two men glared at each other. Annyeke had never experienced such waves of anger as those crackling in the air between them.
    “It doesn’t matter, does it?” she interrupted before the chaos in her eating area that the raven had instigated began again. “However, unlike the background, what matters is what you’ve done with it, and what matters more than anything is the current time. Yes, I know you’ve brought about bad things, Simon, but not to the degree Gelahn has. And you’re trying to help now, aren’t you?”
    Both men muttered something Annyeke decided against interpreting. The ways of Gathandrian men, however diluted the blood, were beyond her. It was best to take