And Night Descends (The Third Book of the Small Gods Series) Read Online Free PDF Page A

too.
    “Mother.”
    He straightened and strode forward three paces, ignoring the now-bearable pain in his side. Gripping the edges of crates to steady himself, he continued on to where he’d left their captive, to where he’d brought Trenan and the others to find the young man gone.
    If he’d been there, would my mother be dead? If they’d seen we made sure he stayed alive, what might have happened?
    His teeth pressed together tighter, biting hard enough his jaw ached. His belly clenched along with it, his sweat-beaded brow creased.
    “If you weren’t gone, mother’d be alive.”
    He kicked a crate hard enough to splinter the wood and make himself wince at the pain it caused his toe, then booted it again anyway. A gull crawked at him from its perch atop a nearby building, tilted its head like it didn’t know why he’d do such a thing. Stirk picked up a piece of wood broken from the crate and heaved it at the shithawk, missing by a wide margin but sending the bird squawking into the sky.
    The big man breathed hard in and out through his nose, nostrils flaring at the briny stink of the sea and the tang of his own sweat. Hauling the salty air into his lungs made him angrier. He balled his hand into a fist, fingernails digging into the fleshy part of his palm. He imagined feeling the same sensation at the end of his left arm where his other hand used to be not so long ago.
    Anger boiled over into rage.
    “You killed my mother,” he said aloud between his clenched teeth. “If we didn’t help you, she’d be alive.”
    Stirk grabbed the edge of the crate he’d kicked and pushed it hard. It rattled back and crashed into another behind it, sending more chunks of wood tumbling to the ground. He held his other hand up in front of his face, glaring at the smooth skin at the end of his wrist.
    “Mother’d be alive and I’d have both hands.”
    He bit his lower lip hard enough to draw blood, spat the bitter flavor from his tongue, then titled his head back and roared at the sky. The sound contained no words, only rage and grief. Another gull squawked at him, as though chastising him for the noise, then took off from its perch, winging its way toward the sea. Stirk watched it go.
    “I’ll kill him,” he said after the bird like he imagined it cared to hear his plans. “I’ll find the prince and kill him for what they did to my mother.”
    Saying it out loud, he realized how difficult fulfilling the promise might be. He didn’t know what happened to the prince, where he’d gone. Had he woken from his prolonged swoon and walked away, headed for home? Did someone find him and return him to the castle? In either case, he’d soon be back behind fortified walls, gone forever from Stirk’s reach, protected from his revenge. But if he’d gone in such manner, he’d have left signs of his passing.
    Stirk cast his eyes to the ground, searching through dirt and pieces of packing straw, splatters of bird shit and streaks of grime. He was no tracker, having spent his entire life in the Horseshoe, so the hodgepodge of scattered bits and streaked splotches all looked the same to him—possibly footprints, more likely something else. He located no clues on the ground around his feet.
    Because the prince was gone didn’t mean he’d been rescued. The soldiers’d been fired up about finding him when Stirk brought them here and found the lad gone, their interest turning to severing necks instead of finding the heir to the throne. Did they see something he didn’t? He bent at the waist, squinted, but the dirt and rocks and bird shit continued telling him nothing.
    Another idea occurred to him as he straightened again: Perhaps a denizen of the docks came upon the prince and hatched the same plan he and Bieta failed at so miserably. If so, they may have the lad hidden nearby.
    Stirk surveyed the buildings lining both sides of the street leading to the pier. Not a door stood open and most of the structures, being warehouses and the