Rhiannon Read Online Free PDF

stared at the floor.
    What had there been in Granna’s riddling words to cause such a strain to fall upon the house? After some time of that tight silence, the good reeve stood and handed Rhiannon his empty mug. He smiled his thanks, but his eyes then quickly shifted to Rhia’s mother.
    â€œAigneis, I’d like a private word before I go back down, if I might.”
    Mam stepped out with him. Rhia, breathless, watched from the window as they walked to the edge of the woods, her mother so small with her clouds of red hair flowing in the breeze and the reeve gangly-tall and light, a big old Saxon through and through, but not bad to look at if you like that kind of thing.
    For all her sad-eyed agreeing about her legs being old, Granna jumped up and skittered quick as a hare to Rhiannon’s side so she could get a good view as well.

Chapter 3
    They watched as Mam and Reeve Clap passed through the bracken and then were cloaked from sight by the deep shade of the thick oak trees at the forest’s edge. When they could no longer see them, still they stood at the window, trying their best to.
    â€œGranna?” Rhia whispered as they peered. “Why’d you give Ona and her girls and Gimp Jim and Dull Sal such a heathen description, saying they were the town’s forgotten damned?”
    â€œYou’ve forgot the Man Who Sleeps,” Granna muttered, then spit into the rushes that covered their floor. “I was including him as well in my heathen description, Rhia. He, too, is one of the forgotten damned, brought up here and left to die.” In a low voice she added, “Don’t mention this floor-spitting to your mam, if you please. I forgot myself.”
    Rhia turned to look into her grandmother’s eyes. “But their sicknesses and injuries are not their own fault, Granna! So how could God damn them, if He is just? And if He isn’t, why do we go to such trouble trying to please Him?”
    It was an important question, possibly the most important thing Rhia had ever thought to ask. Granna poked with the toe of her boot at the rushes she’d grimed, hiding them under others that were fresher, then fished in her waist pouch for the fine bone comb she’d inherited from her own granna. She handed it to Rhia and turned her back so’s Rhia could braid her hair. Once, Rhia’d found a small bird nested within her grandmother’s thick and snarled tresses. Another time she’d uncovered Granna’s favorite smoking pipe, which Granna’d feared was lost forever.
    â€œSo you’d have it that only the Lord God can dispense damnation, heh, granddaughter?” Granna’s head bobbled as she spoke, as Rhia was just then chopping with the comb at a mass of spiderweb. “Oh, human beings can give a person a damning too, and one that may have a sting greater than the merciful Almighty’s! Tell me, child, how many would you count have gone back down the trail once they’ve been brought up to us, each one of them all addled or crippled or, like Ona and her worst-burned twin, singed by house fire crisp as a twig dropped into the firepit?”
    Rhia didn’t have to think. “No one has gone back down,” she answered quietly.
    The first of the invalids had come to them six Januarys before, when Rhia had been only eight. He was an old uncle who’d been sleeping on the beach when a freeze set in and ice took hold of his feet and hands, turning them soft and black with rot. They figured he’d made it up their path by accident, just wandering with his wits inflamed. Mam eased him mightily with her salves, and when he died, they three women had buried him inside the largest of the faeries’ stone circles, within the sacred heart of the forest.
    When word of that got down to the village, it quickly became routine to bring such invalids up their path. They’d had elders who’d lost their reason or use of their limbs, two babies born