Cold Redemption Read Online Free PDF

was
somewhere warm, but she had the most beautiful elfin face and he couldn’t stop looking at her.
    She reddened and looked away. ‘I know you want rest,’ she said, ‘but you need some food first to give you back your strength.’
    Behind her, the other Marroc were looking at him. Addic smiled but the others were less friendly. They were passing the red sword between them, the Edge of Sorrows. His eyes strayed back to the
woman. She looked small and young and determined. Her smile, when it came, was a shy fragile thing. ‘Who are you?’ he asked her.
    She shook her head. ‘Eat.’
    ‘You have beautiful eyes. Full of sadness and steel and passion.’
    She laughed at him, and he had to smile back at the way her face lit up. ‘And you have a mind addled by the cold.’ She fed him one spoonful at a time, and it very likely wasn’t
even remotely the best food he’d ever had, but that was how it seemed.
    ‘My friend,’ he asked when his eyes started to close again. ‘What happened to Gallow?’ But she only smiled and nodded some more and he wasn’t sure she even heard
him, and after that he must have fallen asleep again, because when he woke up it was the middle of the next morning and the house was empty and he felt deliciously wonderfully warm.
    ‘Drink.’ The woman was squatting beside him. She must have woken him again. His head felt clearer now, sharp and focused, not all blurry like the night before. He remembered what
he’d said and cringed and felt stupid.
    ‘I’m sorry.’ He sat up and looked at her, properly this time. She was offering him a warm bowl of something brown and lumpy and full of grease, and even if it was the same as
whatever she’d given him yesterday, a night over the warm embers of the fire hadn’t done it any favours. He wrinkled his nose and tried not to gag; he
was
hungry, though, and
he ached all over. And she
was
pretty, in a boyish sort of way.
    ‘Addic says you were in the mountains.’ She shook her head as though at an errant child. ‘In the winter? You’re lucky the cold didn’t take you.’
    ‘I know. But there were two of us. What happened to my friend?’
    ‘Addic’s outside.’ She smiled. ‘I’ll tell him you’re awake once you’ve eaten.’
    ‘No. My other friend.’ The food wasn’t so bad when he managed not to think about it, not to look at it and not to let it linger in his mouth any longer than necessary.
‘The one who came with me across the mountains.’
    ‘Like you?’ She touched his cheek and it took him a moment to realise why – she’d never seen someone like him before. ‘Where do you come from?’
    ‘Somewhere far away. I lived in a desert on the other side of what was once the Aulian Empire.’
    ‘Then it must have been something very important to make you come all this way and cross the mountains.’ Somehow, without realising it, he’d emptied the bowl.
    ‘I came because my friend asked me to.’
    ‘I’ll find Addic.’ She rose and left him and he watched her go, eyes following her to the door with an unexpected longing until she was gone. Fate had carried Gallow all this
way with her sweet false promises of family and friendship, and Oribas had followed; now he was trapped by the winter in this land with nothing and no one, and Gallow was surely dead. Cruel and
unkind to bring a man so far and then cut him down so close to home.
    Three Marroc came in. Two had knives in their hands. A broad brawny one with a straggly beard and a thin-faced clean-shaven one with a mean look in his eye. The third was Addic. The brawny one
grabbed him by the arm. ‘Aulian, I should cut your throat!’
    Addic put a hand on the brawny one’s arm. ‘This one’s not a sorcerer, Brawlic. He didn’t summon the shadewalkers.’
    ‘Three already in one winter and the forkbeards do nothing!’ The thin-faced one tutted and shook his head. ‘No wonder people are so restless. I’m sure they’d love
nothing more than an Aulian they