By These Ten Bones Read Online Free PDF

if he’s going to live.”

4
    They brought the wood-carver into the house and laid him on the floor by the hearth. Maddie couldn’t even see him for the crowd around him.
    â€œHis shirt’s in ribbons.”
    â€œLook at those claw marks! That’s a big animal. It stood up to attack. The wounds start at the shoulder.”
    â€œI can’t believe a claw could do that. They’re as neat as knife cuts.”
    â€œHe’s burning up with fever.”
    â€œMaddie, run fetch water.” That was her mother’s voice. Maddie snatched up the wooden pail, edged her way to the door, and ran across the wet grass to the little stream. When she came back, most of the neighbors were gone, checking on their livestock or hunting the attacker. Maddie ducked under the low door frame and stepped into the room to find Fair Sarah and Father Mac kneeling by the unconscious young man and sewing him up industriously.
    â€œFind a needle, lass,” boomed Father Mac. “There’s work for everyone. No, no, I’m only joking,” he added as her mother looked up in concern.
    Maddie set down the pail of water and looked at the object of their handiwork. The wood-carver lay on his back, his blood-soaked tunic in a ball beside him. Long red wounds raked diagonally across his pale chest, clustered in lines of four. Bright blood still ran from them and dripped down onto the dirt floor. Her mother kept dabbing the wounds with the tattered tunic so she could see where to stitch.
    â€œIt’s not as bad as it looks,” said Father Mac. “Most of the cuts are shallow. The deepest one is this gash here on the arm. Probably he threw a hand up to defend himself and caught the full force of a claw.”
    â€œIt’s not the wounds, it’s the fever that worries me,” confessed Fair Sarah. “He’s as pale as flax from the blood loss, but he’s blazing with heat. And to take a fever so quick after an injury!”
    Father Mac nodded in agreement. “Aye, that has me puzzled, too,” he rumbled. “It’s uncanny all the way around.”
    Maddie knelt down by them, her attention caught by a faint line under the slashes. She traced a semicircle of scars making its dim purple track across the wounded shoulder.
    â€œHe’s been mauled before,” observed the priest. “That’s some kind of bite. It’s a risk of the traveling life, I suppose, but nothing like this attack.”
    â€œDid you know he can talk?” asked Maddie. “Not like that old man he travels with—he talks just like us.”
    â€œSo he’s one of our own folk,” mused Father Mac. “I suspected as much from his craft. He’s no coward, either; he faced the intruder fair and square. There isn’t a single claw mark on his back.”
    The pair stitched and bandaged while Maddie made breakfast and hurried through the gray morning to take the meal to Lady Mary. All the men were out, urging on Black Ewan’s pair of dogs. They had already been through the castle with torches, but they hadn’t found anything. Lady Mary was supremely annoyed at their intrusion.
    â€œThe wood-carver is badly injured,” Maddie told her, spooning the porridge from her wooden bowl into Lady Mary’s silver one. “They don’t know what attacked him.”
    â€œYou’re late,” answered the contrary woman. “I can tell your mother didn’t cook this egg.” And she pretended not to be interested in the news.
    By the time Maddie returned, Father Mac and Fair Sarah were finished. They had brought the settle out of the storeroom and moved it to the wall by the door, making it into a bed for the wood-carver. The settle was long, like a bench, but it had a wooden back like a chair. The injured young man lay on it with his eyes closed, wrapped in a blanket and not moving at all.
    â€œFresh bloodstains,” said her mother briskly, picking up