Crossed Bones Read Online Free PDF

out of my head.’
    ‘Are you sure? It’s a long way.’
    ‘I do have two legs, in case you hadn’t noticed,’ she snapped back. She quickened her pace, elbows pumping.
    He had noticed, of course. The thought of them made him shiver inside. He fair ran after her. ‘I do have to be back by sundown to help Will with the cows.’
    ‘Best not be wasting time in idle chatter, then,’ Cat declared. She strode out, her skirts swinging wildly.
    They took the footpath across the meadow towards Gariss and Hellangrove. Celandines, scabious and ox-eye daisies studded the grass through which they walked like fallen stars. Cat imagined how she would pick them out in a frieze: little cross stitches of yellow and blue and white against a field of emerald-green.
    To their left the land rose gently through brambled coverts to wooded hills loud with birdsong. The creamy heads of cow-parsley and old man’s beard laced the hedgerows, and a long day’s sunshine had released the hot, peppery scent of herb Robert and the tang of wild garlic into the air. Gulval Downs rose up in front of them, golden with gorse. Invisible overhead, larks poured their hearts out into the azure sky. Cat looked back at her companion, moodily switching the heads off the taller flowers with a willow wand. ‘Come on, you laggard! Have you got lead in your boots?’ She took off running, feeling like the hoyden her mother would have called her had she seen her.
    Forty minutes later they were on the hilltop, in the teeth of a stiff southerly coming in off the sea that flattened the grass on the headland and carved the gorse stands into hawk trees. Cat’s hair whipped back and forth as she sat on a granite cairn in the centre of the earthworks. Eroded and grassed over down the centuries, its warlike origins lost in time, the ancient hill fort curled protectively around her, as if she sat cupped in the hand of the past. Something about the scene made Rob’s heart swell inside him.
    ‘You might be a warrior queen, sat upon your throne. Stay there…’
    She turned to watch him running away from her until he disappeared from view. Discomfited, she frowned; then turned her attention to the sheet of shining sea stretching away to the ends of the world, as it seemed. What lay out there, beyond the horizon, she wondered. Surely marvels beyond price and monsters beyond imagining, exotic lands and other ways of life, where women of talent and ambition were not confined to sweeping and darning and feeding the chickens…
    Robert interrupted her reverie. He held something gingerly in his hands: a circlet of gorse and briar rose and tiny ferns fashioned so that the golden flowers glowed through the spiky foliage like jewels. ‘A crown for a queen,’ he said, and bent to offer it to her on one knee, sunlight pooled in his blue eyes like liquid sky.
    ‘Well, you’d better crown me, then,’ she said peremptorily, though the gesture pleased her.
    He stood and set it gently on her head, and, as he did so, the wind took a tress of her hair and set it blowing free like a great red pennant. He caught it and wound it around his hand, wondering at its silky texture and the fiery sparks trapped within its length. ‘They built these fortresses in King Arthur’s day against the coming of the Danes. Reckon that must make you a prize nabbed from the ships of the sea kings, then,’ he said, grinning. ‘Not proper Cornish like the rest of us.’
    Annoyed by this inference, Cat retrieved her hair from him. ‘Why would I want to be Cornish like the rest of you? Cornwall’s a poor little county full of brigands and idiots and superstitious old biddies.’
    Robert looked pained. ‘And which am I – brigand or idiot?’
    She shrugged dismissively, avoiding the question. ‘What were you discussing with the Master this morning?’
    Rob’s eyes took on a hooded expression; careful, evasive. ‘Nothing important. Jack and Thom had a bit of information for him, is