Fell (The Sight 2) Read Online Free PDF

irritably, looking at a handkerchief poking from Alina’s pocket. Alina pulled it out and Ranna snatched it away from her, bending down to wipe the floor.
    “Let me, Ranna,” said Alina.
    “Oh, get to bed with you.”
    Alina hovered there still.
    “What’s wrong with you now, changeling?” said Ranna, standing straight again.
    “Please, Ranna. May I have some food, first?”
    Ranna frowned, but went over to a cupboard and pulled out some stale bread. Alina looked imploringly at Malduk’s delicious bowl of mutton soup, but Ranna just broke the bread in half and handed a piece to her with a grunt. Without another word the young woman turned and disappeared through the cottage door into the falling snow.
    “And Mia,” said Ranna, turning to her little niece, “put your coat on and fetch me that axe at the back. And some kindling too, from the edge of the forest. We’ll stoke the fire. It’s freezing in here.”
    Outside the snow was falling thickly, and Alina pulled her tunic tightly about her. She realised she had left her dagger on the chest inside but decided to get it in the morning, then ran towards the little barn beyond the yard, where she slept alone each night. The wooden doors were banging on their creaking hinges. There was a break in the cloud above and Alina looked up sadly at the moon. Often in the darkness she would spy shapes in its shining surface and wonder what it really was. It had almost seemed a friend to her, and whenever Alina was troubled by confusion or doubt, by fear and sadness, she would look up and hold onto it like a truth, while the moon would often seem to look down kindly too and whisper—“ Hold on, Alina. Keep on trying .”
    Mia emerged from the house, and Alina smiled at her friend across the yard, then sighed and pulled the barn door fast behind her. The door blocked out most of the wind, although it still whistled mournfully through the rickety slats.
    Alina shivered and felt a familiar loneliness and resentment deep in her heart. It wasn’t only that Malduk and Ranna were so terribly hard on her. She had been with them for six or seven long years—she hardly remembered now—and had come to know most of the villagers and shepherds who cultivated these hills. Yet Alina was still treated as an outsider.
    The other boys thought “Alin’s” ways strange, for he had a much softer, finer quality than they, and his piercing eyes frightened them, while they often teased him for his red hair. The rumours about goblin origins were bad enough, but Alin was often daydreaming too and asking about the world beyond the village, which they all resented. Alina’s only real friend was Mia, but although Alina was desperately fond of the child, little Mia was only nine, so how could she really share the feelings and hopes that were coursing through a growing girl’s blood?
    Alina cast her huge, clever eyes cheerlessly around the scrubby barn. It was so familiar to her now, this gloomy place, that she could see her way around it in the dark, yet a barn had never felt like a real home.
    She thought a little jealously of the blazing stove that the couple would soon be warming themselves by that night, and wondered if the hopeless feeling in her stomach would ever leave her. Alina longed to have proper friends, to talk and dream with other girls her own age, yet her endless chores and thoughts of her origins kept her apart. Perhaps she really was a changeling, and not meant to be amongst humans at all.
    Then what of this human life? It was all right, tending sheep, better than much of the hard work about the farm, and Alina had grown very close to Malduk’s two sheepdogs, Teela and Elak. Just as she loved the animals she saw running free in the forests and the mountains. The lessons that she had been learning from Malduk and the others about shepherding had strengthened her natural instincts as a tomboy too. Yet she felt that there must be more to life than dreaming alone on a mountainside