Season of the Sun Read Online Free PDF

of your mouth. In the future you will open your mouth to me without my having to instruct you.”
    She nodded, words stuck in her throat.
    He leaned down and lightly kissed the tip of her nose. He was smiling. He was completely certain of her now. “Did you speak to your stepfather?”
    Her foolish besottedness faded and she was once again here with a man she’d never seen in her life before yesterday. She shook her head. “He asked me if something was wrong,” she said, looking toward Micklegate, the main great street of York.
    â€œWhy?”
    â€œHe thought I seemed different; he noticed I was somehow bemused, I suppose.”
    â€œNaturally,” he said, and his arrogance made her smile. “Why didn’t you speak to him of me?”
    â€œI did, finally, but not about what you wanted. I wasn’t really certain that it was what you really wanted. Me, that is. You could have changed your mind.”
    â€œI have told you I do not lie. I am not pleased with you, Zarabeth. I want to wed with you, and that is that. It should not have been difficult for you to tell him what you wanted and what would happen. I will go to his shop now. I have trading to do and he is as honest as most merchants here. I will deal with both my furs and you.”
    She grabbed his sleeve, panic filling her. “Wait, Magnus, please. You must understand something about my stepfather. He seems jealous of men who pay attention to me. I don’t know why, truly, but ’tis true, and it frightens me.” To her chagrin, Zarabeth actually wrung her hands. Again she was shocked at herself. However, that action, so utterly female, touched him as nothing else could have.
    He smiled down at her, lightly caressing her cheek with his knuckles. “Don’t worry, little one, I will take care of Olav the Vain.”
    â€œI’m not at all little.”
    â€œYou are to me.” He paused, looking at her, stopping at her breasts. “I want you naked, Zarabeth, and I want you beneath me. I want to kiss your breasts and fit myself between your legs. It tries me to wait to have you.”
    She caught her breath. She thought she had come to understand him just a bit; then he would catch her off-guard, shocking her, making her turn red with the explicitness of his words.
    She turned away, looking down at the muddy rivulets that ran black near her booted feet. There was refuse everywhere, by the well, from both human andanimal. She breathed in deeply. The air was filled with human and animal smells, few of them pleasant. The air itself seemed heavy with the weight of people, always people, too many people. She said suddenly, “This valley where you live, Magnus, it it clean?”
    â€œThe air is so pure you will want to suck it into the very depths of you. There are more and more people in the valley each year, for the land is fertile and they want to survive and thus seek to work for me, but there is still enough space for all of us and our boundless fields. There is not the filth of towns like York, Zarabeth.”
    She was silent.
    â€œI will take you to Kiev someday. There the air is so sharp and pure and cold it hurts you to breathe. Then it rains and snows and you want to die from the endlessness of it all. You see, if you chance to sail into Kiev too late in the fall, why, then you could be forced to remain until spring. The river freezes, you know, and you are a captive for at least six months.”
    She looked at him then, and there was hunger in her eyes, such hunger that it startled him with its intensity, and he continued, wooing her with the magic of the places he was painting with words. “And the steppes, Zarabeth, nothing but miles and miles of thick dry grass, and then suddenly there’s nothing but stretches of barren land for as far as the eye can see. No trees, no bushes, nothing, just that endless savage land. Little survives on the steppes. They are awesome in their