Beguilement Read Online Free PDF

to readjust her torn blue dress. “Stay there.” He followed the blood trail.
    Past a screen of saplings and brush lining the clearing, the splashes grew heavier. By the boulders of the creek a figure lay prone and silent in a red puddle, trousers about his knees, Dag’s arrow clutched in his hand.
    Too still. Dag set his teeth. The man had evidently tried to drag the maddening shaft out of his flesh by main force, and must have ripped open an artery doing so. That wasn’t a killing shot, blight it! Wasn’t supposed to be. Good intentions, where have we met before? Dag balanced himself and shoved the body over with one foot. The pale unshaven face looked terribly young in death, even shadowed as it was by dirt. No answers now to be squeezed from this one; he had reached the last of all betrayals.
    “Absent gods. More children. Is there no end to them?” Dag muttered.
    He looked up to see the woman-child standing a few paces back along the blood trail, staring at them both. Her eyes were huge and brown, like a terrified deer’s. At least she wasn’t screaming anymore. She frowned down at her late assailant, and an unvoiced Oh ghosted from her tender, bitten lips. A livid bruise was starting up one side of her face, scored with four parallel red gouges. “He’s dead?”
    “Unfortunately. And unnecessarily. If he’d just lain still and waited for help, I’d have taken him prisoner.”
    She looked him up, and up, and down, fearfully. The top of her dark head, were they standing closer, would come just about to the middle of his chest, Dag judged. Self-consciously, he tucked his bow-hand down by his side, half out of sight around his thigh, and sheathed his knife.
    “I know who you are!” she said suddenly. “You’re that Lakewalker patroller I saw at the well-house!”
    Dag blinked, and blinked again, and let his groundsense, shielded from the shock of this death, come up again. She blazed in his perceptions. “Little Spark!
    What are you doing so far from your farm?”
     

Chapter 3
     
    The tall patroller was staring at Fawn as though he recognized her. She wrinkled her nose in confusion, not following his words. From this angle and distance, she could at last see the color of his eyes, which were an unexpected metallic gold. They seemed very bright in his bony face, against weathered skin tanned to a dark coppery sheen on his face and hand. Several sets of scratches scored his cheeks and forehead and jaw, most just red but some bleeding. I did that, oh dear.
    Beyond, the body of her would-be ravisher lay on the smoothed stones of the creek bank. Some of his still-wet blood trickled into the creek, to swirl away in the clear water in faint red threads, dissipating to pink and then gone.
    He had been so hotly, heavily, frighteningly alive just minutes ago, when she had wished him dead. Now she had her wish, she was not so sure.
    “I… it…” she began, waving an uncertain hand at, well, everything, then blurted,
    “I’m sorry I scratched you up. I didn’t understand what was coming at me.”
    Then added, “You scared me.” I think I’ve lost my wits.
    A hesitant smile turned the patroller’s lips, making him look for a moment like someone altogether else. Not so… looming. “I was trying to scare the other fellow.”
    “It worked,” she allowed, and the smile firmed briefly before fleeing again.
    He felt his face, glanced at the red smears on his fingertips as if surprised, then shrugged and looked back at her. The weight of his attention was startling to her, as though no one in her life had ever looked at her before, really looked; in her present shaky state, it was not a comfortable sensation.
    “Are you all right otherwise?” he asked gravely. His right hand made an inquiring jerk. The other he still held down by his side, the short, powerful-looking bow cocked at an angle out of the way by his leg. “Aside from your face.”
    “My face?” Her quivering fingertips probed where the