Blood Ties Read Online Free PDF

she could make it.
    She saw some flicker of reaction on his face and the spark of warning inside her grew stronger. Old Ceouf was famed for allowing his men to get away with rape. If she complained to him later about the way his man had dealt with the wolf, the blond would deny it, and accuse her of trying to revenge her rape. And he’d be believed. She would have to give him the wolf skin and then go straight to the warlord and lay it all before him. It was her only chance. Her hand moved slowly to the skin, but he misinterpreted, thought she was taking hold of it in ownership.
    “You’d better do as you’re told, girl. You don’t want anything to happen to your family, do you?” His hand moved again to his sword hilt.
    Of course he would threaten like that, the coward. She felt the contempt take over her face and saw his reaction to it. But she wasn’t prepared for the speed with which he moved.
    He kicked the horse forward and reached to pull her down. She drew back one foot, tough as an old boot from seasons of barefoot running, and kicked him in the head. Her heel connected with his face and he fell backward off the horse. She turned to run, but from the corner of her eye she saw that he lay very still. As still as death.
    She looked back slowly. As the roan shifted uneasily sideways, she saw that he lay on his back, eyes wide, his face with a curious crumpled look. His long nose was shortened like a pig’s. She realized that she had kicked him flat on the nose, that the bone had gone back and entered his brain like a spear. She had killed him.
    She’d meant to run, she’d
planned
to run. But in the moment when he reached for her, an instinct stronger than reason had taken over. Her leg had seemed to move of its own accord, but it had, she realized, been guided by some dark, bone-deep refusal to run: a rejection of fear, of the surrender that comes with fear, an inability to accept that he was worth her fear.
    She hoped that when the warlord’s men found the body it would look as though he had ridden thoughtlessly fast under the low linden bough and been hit in the face, and the horse had ridden to the forest. Would it look like an accident? She didn’t know enough to predict their reaction, so she shrugged the worry away.
    She’d killed a lot of things — the wolf, rabbits, weasels and stoats, fish and fawns. It was a job that had to be done. But she’d always meant to do it. To kill without meaning seemed . . . well, it seemed a waste. A waste of what, she wasn’t sure. Life? Purpose? Or something harder to name, though she could feel it. Her own soul? She couldn’t look away from his face. He seemed improved by death; his face had lost its scowl. It felt odd to have interrupted the life of someone she knew nothing about, to kill someone she had only just met, as though killing needed intimacy, deep knowledge of the other, to make it all right. She forced herself to look away from him, and immediately realized that she had better get away, and fast.
    Her heart was racing, her stomach clenched, her skin was clammy. Fear or the exaltation of escape? She didn’t know. But although fear was as good a name as any, the same impulse that had sent her foot against his face now prevented her from naming her racing heart as fearful. Excitement, the need to get moving, were better reasons.
    She slid onto the broad back of the roan and gathered up the reins with clumsy hands. She couldn’t reach the stirrups and it seemed somehow impolite to just kick the horse, so she clicked with her tongue, as plowmen did to draft horses, and the roan willingly moved off toward the trees. Even then, in the first moment of riding him, she wanted to keep him, felt that they had already become attached by fellow feeling against the man.
    It was the first time Bramble had been on a horse since old Cuthbert, a Traveling tinker, had given her rides on his cart horse when she was six. It was a long way to the ground. She swallowed