Something Red Read Online Free PDF

the party and had managed to engage the scholar inconversation. “. . . Lady Svajone,” he was saying. “We will . . . we will to going . . . we will to go our way homeward, to far Lietuva, across the . . . the seawater, far past Normandy, far past the Burgundians and the Rhinelanders.” His speech was rapid, but oddly accented.
    Lady Svajone leaned forward, her luminous eyes fixed on Molly. “Our home is being . . . many away. Is being much away. You also, you also from many away, from not, from not here?” Her voice was whispery but sweet, like a little girl with a sore throat.
    Molly smiled at her and spoke slowly and simply. “My home is in Erin, what these folk call Ireland, across the inner sea,” she said. Her strong accent became if anything more vivid, just from the mention of home.
    “I am Doctor Vytautas,” the scholar said. “We have find a . . . refuge? a refuge here for a while. Is been much of the not pleasant, the not peace, in our home countries.” He took a sip of the honey beer. He smoothed his damp mustaches with a forefinger, a fussy gesture. “I am been secretary and physician to the family”—he indicated Lady Svajone with a kind of seated half-bow—“is now a score and a half of years. Much of the family holding is been . . . is losted, but now hope is coming that . . . well. We will return, now that the circumstances have, have more of the . . . of the favor.”
    “I wish you joy of it,” said Molly. “Be said by me, exile has a bitter taste, and it’s not from well-side gossip that I’m speaking at all.”
    One of the fair men leaned over and cut off a tiny bit of fresh bread for the old woman, placing it on her trencher of stale bread, beside her untouched portion of turnip stew. She put it in her mouth and ate it slowly. She said something in their language to Vytautas, a querulous note in the sweet faint voice. He stroked her hand, small and bony, the knuckles prominent and the skin near-translucent, spotted with age. He murmured in her ear. He looked up and said, “Gintaras . . . ” He motioned to the young man, who cut another dainty piece. She toyed withthe morsel and began a long mumbled complaint to Gintaras, who bent his head to hear.
    Molly drained her jack of honey beer and reached for the jug. Her face had a flushed glow; she was beginning to sweat from the beer and the food and the fire. She leaned toward Vytautas. “Is it a poor appetite she has?” she asked in a low voice. “I have a remedy for a sickly nature.”
    He said, “Brother Abbot has speak of your . . . knowing? knowledge, your knowledge of the herbs. I have my own remedies, but my . . . stuffs, my materials are . . . thin? deplete? I would being grateful for some things of the summer woods, of the woods of this summer that has passed. Although . . . ” He glanced sideways at his charge, then back at Molly, managing to convey, with the faintest of shrugs, the slightest lift of the eyebrows, how little he dared hope that anything might be of help.
    Molly asked him a question in what Hob knew to be Latin. Vytautas’s eyes widened with surprise, then crinkled with pleasure, and he relaxed into the comfort of a language in which he was fluent, the universal tongue of scholars. Molly leaned forward, searching his face, following along. In addition to her native Irish, she had a mastery of English, whether the near-German low speech used by the Angle and Saxon peasants or the near-French high speech of the Norman lords. Her Latin, though, was adequate but halting, and she had to concentrate not to be left behind.
    The incomprehensible syllables washed over Hob. He found that when he blinked, his eyes would stay closed till he struggled to open them. The warm weight of food in his stomach, the honey beer, the heat from the fire trench, the hum of talk, left him in a happy trance, and he put his head slowly down on his crossed arms and listened to the sound of