Brothers' Fury (Bleeding Land Trilogy 2) Read Online Free PDF

the rain that was beginning to dash against its oak lid.
    ‘I don’t know why you have to antagonize him,’ Ruth said, shaking her head. ‘God knows there aren’t many landlords who would have you in their employ and under their roof.’
    ‘Because I fought? Because I was killing men while they were filling cups and keeping their heads down?’ Tom asked, puffing with the effort. Normally they would roll the barrels, but the cobbles of Long Southwark had been known to bust a stave and that was a risk Abiezer Grey was not prepared to take with Reede’s beer.
    ‘Because you are the worst worker the Lord has seen for ten years!’ Ruth said.
    ‘I earn my bread,’ he called behind him, then scraped his knuckles on the Lord’s doorframe and cursed as he entered the dark, musty-smelling inn.
    ‘Aye, maybe,’ Ruth said, suddenly behind him so that with a grimace he straightened, making the load look lighter than it was. ‘But you’re too proud to make a decent servant and too surly to be good company.’
    ‘Which is why I should be back with the regiment,’ he said, as a knot of men and women who were wreathed in their own pipe smoke and talking all at once parted to let him, and more importantly Reede’s beer, through.

CHAPTER THREE

    IT HAD NOT been easy saying goodbye to Ruth for the second time. Two nights ago, when most of The Leaping Lord’s patrons had either staggered off to their lodgings or home to their beds, he and Ruth had shared three pitchers of Reede’s strongest beer and a handful of the tobacco which Ralph Hall had, to his credit, bought off Timothy Bowell for tenpence a pound. Tom, who had in his mind loaded and primed the issue of his leaving, in the event found himself reluctant to pull the trigger and inwardly wondered at this cowardice which he had never felt in battle but which now held him to ransom.
    In the end, after hours of empty talk, it had been Ruth who gave voice to the thing, exhaling smoke that floated up to the dark-stained roof in a perfect, ethereal circle.
    ‘You’re leaving. When? Tomorrow? The day after?’ she had said, then taken a long draught of beer as though it meant nothing to her; yet all this outward disregard achieved was to betray the truth. She cared a great deal.
    ‘Tomorrow,’ Tom had replied, caught off guard and feeling that one word both inadequate and cruel. ‘My wounds are healed.’
    ‘Are they?’ Ruth asked, blue eyes glaring, her plump cheeks flushing red.
    He had shrugged. ‘I have my duty. This war is just beginning and I won’t hide from it.’
    ‘You want revenge,’ she accused him.
    He had not disagreed with that and they had sat in silence for a long moment. Then Ruth had stood, thrusting her cup at him, so that some of the beer sloshed over its lip onto the table.
    ‘If you leave tomorrow then do not come back, Thomas,’ she had said, holding his eye, then downing the remaining beer in one go. ‘You will not be welcome here again.’ And with that she had turned and pushed off through the last of the Lord’s drinkers. The next day, an hour before dawn and his head ringing like the bells of St Saviour’s church, Tom had put all his worldly belongings into a knapsack and left The Leaping Lord.
    He had followed the Thames upriver, riding some eleven miles to Richmond where, he had heard, Sir William Balfour was recruiting. For Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex and commander of Parliament’s forces, planned to move west to take Windsor, Henley-on-Thames and Reading, and the bitter winter months were the time to forge an army. A renowned man of principle and a good soldier, Balfour would be integral to Essex’s ambitions, Tom knew. The Scotsman had commanded Tom’s regiment as lieutenant-general of horse at Kineton Fight and Tom respected him. He was a fighter, a man who had broken several regiments of the King’s foot, and Tom believed that his own best chance of re-entering the fray, of exacting vengeance upon his enemies, lay