Scarlet and the White Wolf [01] - Scarlet and the White Wolf Read Online Free PDF Page B

the dead baby: how the squat, parchment-skinned Minh had put the infant into the town well with the others, and how Linhona 32
    Scarlet and the White Wolf--Book One
    by Kirby Crow
    had walked for days afterward not knowing where she was headed, only that she must keep moving or die.
    Scarlet cast an uncomfortable glance at Scaja, because he never knew why Linhona must tell this part, or why she spoke of her own survival and freedom in such a tone, as if she had not deserved it. The raiders might have chosen otherwise and taken her with her son back to Minh, and then they would never have known her. Could she have regretted that? How could she possibly?
    Scaja had tried to explain it once: "She thinks she brought it on them," he said in his stolid voice. "Bad luck from her reading and writing. Her husband allowed it. He was not of the blood," he always added, as if that explained everything.
    Not of the blood meant that Linhona's first husband was Aralyrin, that his Hilurin heritage was diluted, and so he did not have the Gift and could not kindle the fire by dropping a withy-thought into the sticks or make healing tea by breathing on the water or whistle fish up to the surface to be sang to sleep and caught in the hand. These things and much more Linhona taught her children of the Gift, which occurred only among Hilurin families and certainly not among everyone and was a closely guarded secret, but she had flatly refused to teach either Scarlet or Annaya how to read.
    "The next morning it was over," Linhona continued. "We could see the Minh from our hiding place. They were a long line of straggling black against the purple hills. We went back to town, but it was ruined: the well polluted, the fountain shattered into bits of marble, and the mill and the grain barns in cinders. Half the houses were burned. I felt like I walked in 33
    Scarlet and the White Wolf--Book One
    by Kirby Crow
    a dream. You know how it is in dreams, Annaya? When you seem to move and walk but don't really get anywhere?"
    Annaya nodded, mute with interest but also sleepy.
    "I went home to our cottage. When I got there, I took things blindly and stuffed them into a sack: a cooking pot, a bowl, a blanket. I tried to leave the cloth doll that Gedda used to play with, but I could not. I put on Jorlen's new boots and took his coat and long-knife and whatever else I could find of value, and I left. I did not know which direction to go. It was cold and I could not think well. My head seemed to be wrapped in layers of wool that muffled my very thoughts.
    When I was many leagues outside of the village, I sat down by a tree and went to sleep, and during the night it snowed."
    It was that image that haunted him the most from Linhona's story. The thought of her sleeping on the bare ground, dressed as a man, snow covering her in her weariness, like some doomed wanderer from a fairy tale who would soon be set upon by the Shining Ones and taken into the Otherworld. Scarlet shivered a little and Scaja patted his arm, the earlier argument between them already forgotten. It was not so easy for Scarlet.
    "I had a fever when I woke," Linhona said, "but it seemed to help me think. I found I was on the west road to the Channel. It was as good a road as any and less traveled, which was well with me. That night, I tried to burn Gedda's doll. I used my Gift to whisper up a fire and threw it in. I watched it catch and flare. The little yarn curls on its head began to smoke, and suddenly I had the thing out of the coals and was beating at the flames with my bare hands. I spent 34
    Scarlet and the White Wolf--Book One
    by Kirby Crow
    most of the night stitching the scorched cloth together with scraps torn from my hem, and my hands were blistered, but I was comforted when I laid my head on a bed of evergreen and held the doll to my breast. I did not turn east to follow Gedda, for he would have forgotten how to speak Bizye by the next spring, and would not know me when I saw him again.