Catherine Coulter Read Online Free PDF Page A

toward them. It was a woman, as old and bent as Tupper.
    “My lord?” Her voice was thin and quavery. “My sweet little boy? Garron? Tupper, you’re standing with him, is it really our boy? Eller, I see you hanging back. Come here to me. Tupper, tell me, is it our boy?”
    “Aye, Miggins, ’tis he and he’s proud and strong. Jest ye look at him, here to save us.”
    And Garron remembered her, of course. How could she still be alive? “Is it really you, Miggins?”
    “Aye, my boy.”
    Eller, the armorer, so thin he could hide behind a sapling trunk, hovered over Miggins, his hand on her thin shoulder. He wasn’t all that old, but he looked beaten down, gaunt, his face leached of color, as if he knew life was over and he was simply waiting for death to haul him off.
    Miggins pulled out a stub of a lit candle from behind her back and she held it high to shine it on his face as she walked slowly to him. He saw that her gown was filthy and torn. She shuffled along, indeed an old woman. So thin, her cheeks sunken in, like the two men’s. She stared up at him, studied his face.
    “Aye, jest look at ye, yer so big now. Ye were gone so many years, and they weren’t all bad, those years, and they passed quickly, as years are wont to do as the years press down on ye. At least Tupper and Eller and I still cling to the earth rather than lie dead beneath it with all the others.” Then she smiled at him and gave him a curtsey.
    “Why didn’t you come to me sooner?” Garron asked as he lifted her to her feet and embraced her.
    The old woman said, “Ye might not have been my boy and ye’d have taken my candle and burned off my nose.”
    “Your nose is safe, Miggins. I am here now. You and Eller and Tupper must tell me what has happened. Where are all the soldiers? Where are all my people?”
    Miggins craned her neck back so she could look up at him again, holding her candle high. “Ye have yer sweet mother’s face, but not her eyes, no, you have his eyes, but I see no madness there, thank Saint Rupert’s clean heart. Ah, now I can see him in you, that jaw, stubborn as a stoat’s, that jaw, and yer strong neck, but pray God what’s him is only on the outside—no rot in yer soul. Poor Lord Arthur, his insides were very like yer father. Ye aren’t like yer father or yer brother, are ye, Lord Garron?”
    “No, I am not like them.” Garron rarely thought about his father anymore, a hard man who was wont to strike out with his fists when suddenly rages would come upon him. Garron remembered now that he’d once struck Miggins when he disliked a gown she’d sewn for Garron’s mother. His fist had jerked her off her feet and slammed her into a stone wall. It was one of the few times Garron could remember his mother crying.
    But surely Arthur hadn’t been a bad man or a wastrel master, had he? But his rages , Garron thought, he’d forgotten about Arthur’s rages, unleashed when one didn’t expect them, then gone in a flash, but only after spilled blood, broken bones, and curses. Arthur was taller than Garron had been at sixteen, bigger, and hard with muscle, his voice loud enough to reach fishing boats at sea.
    Miggins whispered, “I prayed the good Lord would save us and He did, though He waited until there nearly wasn’t anything left to save.” She crossed herself and looked around at the heavy, silent darkness.
    Tupper whispered, as if afraid someone would leap out and shove a knife in his throat, “There are a few others here, my lord. Most are gone or dead. Will everyone return? Mayhap now that ye are here they will. Those who still live, that is.”
    Garron couldn’t take it in. He asked again, “This Retribution, Tupper, you said it was a plague of a human sort.”
    “Worse than a sickness plague,” Miggins whispered, “much worse.”
    He wanted to yell at them to spit it out, but held to his patience. They were old, they were starving, and why was that? “If it wasn’t a sickness plague, then tell