Bard I Read Online Free PDF Page A

ran to the edge of the pit. When she beheld the feasting wolves she fell to her knees.
    ‘Felimid—ah, Felimid!’ she moaned. ‘God forgive me!’
    Regan!
    Let it be written in Felimid’s favor that it never entered his head to slip through the doorway and leave her. He passed an arm around her waist, clapped a hand over her mouth. She jerked spastically at his touch. A fright for a fright. Swiftly, he dragged her outside.
    ‘It’s all right,’ he said low. ‘It’s not myself the wolves are eating. Now don’t shriek or have fits! This isn’t the time! Do you understand me?’
    She nodded. He freed her mouth.
    ‘You are a magician,’ she whispered. ‘How else can you be alive and free? Look there! I’ve brought your harp and sword.’
    Golden Singer and Kincaid had been set down next to the wall, with a leather sack of a size to be tucked under one arm placed beside them. A heavy cloak lay folded atop them all.
    Cairbre and Ogma! And he’d cautioned her not to give way to fits! Fits, indeed! She’d done a magnificent night’s work. How she’d managed to get her hands on the harp and the sword baffled him. Surely Oisc would not have left them just lying around.
    “It’s wonderful you are!’ the bard told her. ‘Listen, my wren, I’m for the Forest of Andred. Do you come with me?’
    Joy flashed from the blue, blue eyes. ‘Yes, and bless you! Will I? Short of cutting my throat, you couldn’t make me stay here!’
    Felimid kissed her briefly. He hadn’t been sure. Many there were who said they would chance any danger for what they desired most, but balked when it came to turning their words into action. Felimid didn’t despise them; he’d felt the ache of indecision himself, often. But it couldn’t form any part of their baggage on this journey.
    Neither the walls nor the gate of Oisc’s burg were guarded. The men whose duty it should have been were drinking as though they believed in the dry Christian hell, or flat on their backs in straw, sleeping. This was Yule. In no time the fugitive pair were out, and gone.
     
    The bard was awakened by the barking of dogs. He tried to leap up and draw steel. He was not successful. Regan lay asleep on top of him, four sheep were clustered suffocatingly tight about them. and they were buried in a snowdrift.
    They had fled the Isle of Thanet in a stolen boat. When they’d reached the mainland of Kent, they’d turned the boat adrift. and begun their long journey afoot with an angry nor’-easter at their backs. An hour or two after midnight, snow had come with it. falling thick and fast. Before long, Regan came to the end of her strength and Felimid had to carry her. This soon brought him to the end of his. Regan made a solid armful, despite her small size. and the sack of food she had filched to sustain them was not weightless.
    Then they had stumbled upon four lost sheep huddled against a pile of boulders, and taken shelter with them. The snow had buried the entire group, but the warmth and pressure of their bodies hollowed a small, hard-packed space around them, and their breath had formed a little shaft for air. They had kept each other from dying of cold. Although not comfortable, they were alive.
    Now, Felimid heard the dogs. They were directly above him. Oisc? Na, na. That was not the deep fierce baying of the king’s hounds. This was a light shrill yelping, excited and glad.
    Regan was awake now. Together they dug up through the snow with their hands. while the dogs burrowed down. In a moment, their whitened heads found the open air. Two feet of snow had fallen in the night, and the wind had piled it high against the rocks, burying them a fathom deep.
    Felimid sneezed. He clambered out of the snowdrift in the grey false dawn, stinking of sheep, while the dogs doubled their barking. Lean, lop-eared, rough-coated, bright-eyed mongrels they were, not big but clever. When he kicked them away, they darted around him still and would not stint their noise. He