Before They Are Hanged Read Online Free PDF Page B

kind. The kind his mother had scared him with stories of when he was a child. A man whose work, and whose pastime, and whose purpose, was to kill. West looked from that hard blade to those hard eyes and back, numb with horror. He was finished. He would die here in the cold forest, down in the dirt like a dog.
    West dragged himself up by one hand, seized by a sudden impulse to run. He looked over his shoulder, but there was no escape that way. A man was moving through the trees towards them. A big man with a thick beard and a sword over his shoulder, carrying a child in his arms. West blinked, trying to get some sense of scale. It was the biggest man he had ever seen, and the child was Lord Marshal Burr. The giant tossed his burden down on the ground like a bundle of sticks. Burr stared up at him, and burped.
    West ground his teeth. Riding off like that, the old fool, what had he been thinking? He'd killed them both with his fucking 'sometimes you just want to ride'. Makes you feel alive? Neither one of them would live out the hour.
    He had to fight. Now might be his last chance. Even if he had nothing to fight with. Better to die that way than on his knees in the mud. He tried to dig the anger out. There was no end to it, when he didn't want it. Now there was nothing. Just a desperate helplessness that weighed down every limb.
    Some hero. Some fighter. It was the most he could do to keep from pissing himself. He could hit a woman alright. He could throttle his sister half to death. The memory of it still made him choke with shame and revulsion, even with his own death staring him in the face. He had thought he would make it right later. Only now there was no later. This was all there was. He felt tears in his eyes.
    'Sorry,' he muttered to himself. 'I'm sorry.' He closed his eyes and waited for the end.
    'No need for sorry, friend, I reckon he's been bitten harder.'
    Another Northman had melted out of the woods, crouching down beside West on his haunches. Lank, matted brown hair hung around his lean face. Quick, dark eyes. Clever eyes. He cracked a wicked grin, anything but reassuring. Two rows of hard, yellow, pointed teeth. 'Sit,' he said, accent so thick that West could scarcely understand him. 'Sit and be still is best.'
    A fourth man was standing over him and Burr. A great, broad-chested man, his wrists as thick as West's ankles. There were grey hairs in his beard, in his tangled hair. The leader, it seemed, from the way the others made room for him. He looked down at West, slow and thoughtful, as a man might look at an ant, deciding whether or not to squash it under his boot.
    'Which of 'em's Burr, do you think?' he rumbled in Northern.
    'I'm Burr,' said West. Had to protect the Lord Marshal. Had to. He clambered up without thinking, but he was still dizzy from the fall, and he had to grab hold of a branch to stop himself falling. 'I'm Burr.'
    The old warrior looked him up and down, slow and steady. 'You?' He burst into a peal of laughter, deep and menacing as a storm in the distance. 'I like that! That's nice!' He turned to the evil-looking one. 'See? I thought you said they got no guts, these Southerners?'
    'It was brains I said they was short on.' The one-eared man glowered down at West the way a hungry cat looks at a bird. 'And I've yet to see otherwise.'
    'I think it's this one.' The leader was looking down at Burr. 'You Burr?' he asked in the common tongue.
    The Lord Marshal looked at West, then up at the towering Northmen, then he got slowly to his feet. He straightened and brushed down his uniform, like a man preparing to die with dignity. 'I'm Burr, and I'll not entertain you. If you mean to kill us, you should do it now.' West stayed where he was. Dignity hardly seemed worth the effort now. He could almost feel the axe biting into his head already.
    But the Northman with the grey in his beard only smiled. 'I can see how you'd make that mistake, and we're sorry if we've frayed your nerves at all, but we're not