Godbond Read Online Free PDF Page B

was gone.
    I plunged outside. The deer people were gone, had scattered, and in a heartbeat I saw why. Ytan stood on a low crag, near at hand but out of reach of my sword, and though his spear still lay in the cave, he had found—
    I dove, and heard the faint whirr as an arrow skimmed over my back, the thwock as it lodged in the resinous trunk of a yellow pine. I snatched a glimpse of it teetering there, a crude shaft, poorly fletched, as I landed on the ground, rolled, and scrambled for shelter. Even as I came to my knees behind the pine another arrow thudded into it, and I heard Ytan laughing again.
    â€œWhere is Sakeema?” I bellowed at him. The more fool, I. As if Ytan would tell me, even if he could.
    â€œWhose face did you see, Dannoc, when you stood shaking and found me?” he replied, and then he shouted with laughter, yell after yell of mocking, moon-mad laughter. He stood on his crag nearly helpless with laughter. I set my teeth, slipped my own bow off my shoulder, made shift to ready it without standing up.
    â€œWho has knocked your nose askew, my brother?” Ytan cried crazily.
    There on his vantage he stood, with the mighty peaks looming behind him, shining in sundown light—seemingly as tall and goodly as the mountains he stood in deerskin leggings and bisonhide boots, bare-chested and mighty-shouldered, his drygrass-yellow braids hanging long, as befits a Red Hart warrior. And a Red Hart’s strong, beardless, fair-browed face.… But for the braids, Kor had once told me, I looked enough like Ytan to be his twin. And all the more so, Ytan seemed to be saying, now that my broken nose had skewed my face, making me resemble the bent-from-true, leftward thing he was.
    â€œTell me who has hurt you! I will avenge you, brother mine.”
    â€œMahela take you,” I muttered, setting arrow to my bowstring.
    â€œIt was Korridun, was it not? Why are you not with your beloved Kor?” He needs must taunt me by those I loved.… “And where is that dark-browed warrior maiden? The haughty rider on the pied black gelding? Castrated it herself, she did. How proud of her you must be. What is it you call her? Tassida My Love?”
    I felt my throat close with a spasm, more in heartache than in rage any longer. How had he come to know so much? The devourer in him, it had taken his cleverness and turned it dark, evil.
    I had let a devourer out of my father’s body with my sword. Mind had often told me to do the same unkind favor for Ytan. But first, I had to get near him.
    I had nocked an arrow to my bowstring. Rising, I took aim. “This is meant for a feather in your hair, Ytan,” I shouted as I let fly, for I wanted him to know that my aim was true.
    He jumped aside, but the arrow was far more swift. It stopped his laughter, piercing the braid by his ear, as I had intended it to do. With an angry yell he broke it and pulled it out, and I stepped forward, another shaft at the ready.
    â€œYou should have kept that, Ytan,” I mocked. His arrows were crude things, likely to fly astray, for he had never been much of a craftsman, Ytan. His bow, I saw, was made of bent ashwood, less powerful than my sinew-and-hartshorn one. He was not unskilled as an archer, and I knew it, but I had the better weapons.
    He knew it too, and let fly with words instead of bolts. “Has Tassida left you, Dan? The rotbottom wench, how could she? Yet I thought I saw her galloping off like a hellkite, one night in a storm.”
    The piss-proud cock, spying on me.… My jaw hardened, and I eased closer to him. Seeing me coming, he grinned anew.
    â€œI have a plan, Dannoc,” he told me in a friendly way. “I know what I am going to do. I am going to find her before you do, that proud Tassida. And I am going to lie with her. If I let my hair hang loose, and come to her in the dusk and whisper her name, she will think my name is Dan.”
    My fingers jumped on the bowstring. He