Neveryona Read Online Free PDF Page B

off to fight for the Empress. “Not overly married” meant that certain bonding rituals had been publicly observed between them, but certain others that would make those early ones permanent had not. Her mother’s abandonment had occurred within a margin of respectability – inconvenient as it was. But then, the army had not been that convenient for her father, either; its stringencies had apparently given him enough appreciation of the domestic life he’d left so that on his death pallet he’d asked a dusky friend to return his sword, shield, and sundry effects to Ellamon –which Pryn’s mother had immediately sold, giving the money to the aunt to maintain her baby while she went to seek work in another town. Growing up with that wise woman and her other cousins had not been bad.
    Pryn was a girl who knew who she was and could now write her name correctly.
    Somehow she’d already connected that, as indeed she connected almost all about her she felt to be mature, with accepting that parental death and suppressing those childish fancies that perhaps the black soldier had been mistaken (had found the wrong woman, the wrong city …), or had been part of some trick by a father even more scoundrelly than her mother, when in her cups, sometimes claimed that brave soldier to have been, or had simply lied from caprice. No, she thought again. He is dead. I am alive.
    And my fortune?
    Her memory turned to the tale-teller’s city, risen in mist from the waters, its grand dragon guarding the queen’s treasure in those flooded streets.
    Sunlight had begun to break through the overcast. Clouds pulled from swatches of blue.
    The real city below, under real fog and real sun, theone now giving way to the other, was ominous. She wondered if the tale-teller’s friend – was it Raven? – with her blue beads and her mask and her double blade had ever stood like this, on this rise, this road, looking down on this city as the earth heaved from dark dawn to morning …
    Pryn did not hear the hoofbeats till they were almost on her. (Three times over the week she’d hidden in the bushes while mounted men in leather aprons herded dusty men and women, chained collar to collar, along the road ruts. She’d seen slaves chained to planks outside the walls of Ellamon, six or ten together, waiting to be fed. She’d seen slaves, two or three, chained in the sunny corner of the dusty Ellamon market, under the eyes of an overseer, waiting to be bought.) She whirled about, then dashed for the road’s edge. But she had seen the three riders – which meant the riders had seen her.
    The three horses hammered abreast of her, halted.
    The tallest and, from his reddish beard and open face, the youngest grinned. ‘What are you looking at, girl?’ Some teeth were missing.
    Pryn recovered from her crouch, thigh deep in scratchy brush. ‘Are you slavers?’ – though in asking, she’d realized they were not.
    Another rider, a weathered man, squat, muscular, and hairy-shouldered, threw back his head and laughed. His teeth, the ones visible, were large, yellow, and sound.
    The third was naked, save a cloth tied about his forehead and hanging to his shoulders. ‘Do we look like slavers?’ His voice was rough enough to suggest a throat injury. On the right side of his body, Pryn saw, as his horse wheeled and wheeled back over the road, long scars roped him, chest, flank, and thigh, as though someone had flung blacksnakes at him that had stuck. ‘Do you think we look like slavers, girl?’
    Pryn shook her head.
    ‘Slavers!’ The youngster laughed. Despite his height, Pryn was sure he was not a year older than she. ‘Us, slavers? Do you know Gorgik the Liberator? We’re going to join him and his men at – ’ He stopped, because the other two grimaced. The squat one made half a motion for silence. The youngster leaned forward, more soberly. ‘You want to know if we’re slavers? Well, we have a question for you: Are you one of the Child