Runemarks Read Online Free PDF Page A

One-Eye,” he said.
    And then Maddy uncurled her fist, still grubby from her climb up the big beech tree, and showed him the ruinmark on her hand.

    For a moment the Outlander’s good eye widened beneath the brim of his hat. On Maddy’s palm, the ruinmark stood out sharper than usual, still rust-colored but now flaring bright orange at the edges, and Maddy could feel the burn of it—a tingling sensation, not unpleasant, but definitely there, as if she had grasped something hot a few minutes before.
    He looked at it for a long time. “D’you know what you’ve got there, girl?”
    “Witch’s Ruin,” said Maddy promptly. “My sister thinks I should wear mittens.”
    One-Eye spat. “
Witch
rhymes with
bitch.
A dirty word, for dirty-minded folk. Besides, it was never a Witch’s
Ruin,
” he said, “but a Witch’s
Rune:
the runemark of the Fiery.”
    “Don’t you mean the Faërie?” said Maddy, intrigued.
    “Faërie, Fiery, it’s all the same. This rune”—he looked at it closely—“this mark of yours. Do you know what it is?”
    “Nat Parson says it’s the devil’s mark.”
    “Nat Parson’s a gobshite,” One-Eye said.
    Maddy was torn between a natural feeling of sacrilege and a deep admiration of anyone who dared call a parson
gobshite.
    “Listen to me, girlie,” he said. “Your man Nat Parson with his foolish Good Book has every reason to fear that mark. Aye, and envy it too.”
    Once more he studied the design on Maddy’s palm, with interest and—Maddy thought—some wistfulness. “A curious thing,” he said at last. “I never thought to see it here.”
    “But what is it?” said Maddy. “If the Book isn’t true—”
    “Oh, there’s truth in the Book,” said One-Eye, and shrugged. “But it’s buried deep under legends and lies. That war, for instance…”
    “Tribulation,” said Maddy helpfully.
    “Aye, if you like, or Ragnarók. Remember, it’s the winners write the history books, and the losers get the leavings. If the Æsir had won—”
    “The Æsir?”
    “Seer-folk, I daresay you’d call ’em here. Well, if they’d won that war—and it was
close,
mind you—then the Elder Age would not have ended, and your Good Book would have turned out very different, or maybe never been written at all.”
    Maddy’s ears pricked up at once. “The Elder Age? You mean
before
Tribulation?”
    One-Eye laughed. “Aye. If you like. Before that, Order reigned. The Æsir kept it, believe it or not, though there were no Seers among them in those days, and it was the Vanir, from the borders of Chaos—the Faërie, your folk’d call ’em—that were the keepers of the Fire.”
    “The Fire?” said Maddy, thinking of her father’s smithy.
    “Glam.
Glám-s
ý
ni,
they called it. Rune-caster’s glam. Shape-changer’s magic. The Vanir had it, and the children of Chaos. The Æsir only got it later.”
    “How?” said Maddy.
    “Trickery—and theft, of course. They stole it and remade the Worlds. And such was the power of the runes that even after the Winter War, the fire lay sleeping underground, as fire may sleep for weeks, months—years. And sometimes even now it rekindles itself—in a living creature, even a child—”
    “Me?” said Maddy.
    “Much joy may it bring you.” He turned away and, frowning, seemed once more absorbed in his book.
    But Maddy had been listening with too much interest to allow One-Eye to stop now. Until then she had heard only fragments of tales—and the scrambled versions from the Book of Tribulation, in which the Seer-folk were mentioned only in warnings against their demonic powers or in an attempt to ridicule those long-dead impostors who called themselves gods.
    “So—how do you know these stories?” she said.
    The Outlander smiled. “You might say I’m a collector.”
    Maddy’s heart beat faster at the thought of a man who might
collect
tales in the way another might collect penknives, or butterflies, or stones. “Tell me more,” she said