Soulvine 03 A Bright and Terrible Sword Read Online Free PDF Page A

coloured-glass jewellery, hand mirrors with carved gilded frames – things that village folk could not obtain save twice a year. This was the spring faire, to celebrate the end of planting; there would also be a harvest faire. The booths had been set up in a field at the far end of town. Caravans and worn tents and sale goods remained the same, but nothing else did.
    Silence, thick and heavy as wool, hung over the field. Only a few villagers had come to the faire. Except for a boisterous group under the ale tent, who did not seem to be local, people stood in small serious clumps between tents, talking in low tones. Even the few children seemed subdued, gawking at the booths but not clamouring to be taken inside.
    A figure approached Hunter and me. My stomach clenched. I remembered him: Kah the Fire Eater, a small wiry man in bizarre turquoise breeches, soft slippers like a lady’s, and swirls of colour on his face and naked chest. He had been travelling faires when Hartah had had his booth. ‘Sir, be ye from this place?’
    ‘No,’ I said, with relief. He did not recognize me. Bearded, one-handed, years older, there was little to connect me with Roger Kilbourne, Hartah’s timorous and resentful nephew.
    ‘Ye be a stranger here?’
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘Then ye don’t know what has happened.’
    ‘No – what?’
    ‘That’s what I be asking ye ,’ Kah said. His face furrowed in frustration, creasing the bright paint. ‘The folk be not coming to the faire! How are we to eat if they don’t come and buy?’
    ‘Has there … has there been plague here?’
    ‘Plague? No! Nothing like that, nothing a man can understand . I think the villagers all be daft. They talk on and on of their babes, as if the small ones all died, but from what I hear, they ain’t!’ He glared at me as if I were responsible for these babies, dead or alive.
    ‘Then what—’ I had trouble getting the words out ‘—what did happen to their children?’
    ‘I don’t know,’ Kah said, disgusted. ‘Not dead, not sickly, not stolen. Just gone quiet. What be ill about aquiet child? A blessing, if you ask me – children make too much by damn noise anyway.’
    Gone quiet. Like the infant in the cottage at Rivertown? Like all the infants under a year old at Rivertown? I managed to say, ‘How many babies—’
    ‘I don’t know, and it makes no cheese ale to me.’ All at once he looked hopeful. ‘Would ye like to see a display of fire-eating, sir? Fresh from performing afore the Princess herself and all her titled court and—’ He scanned my tattered clothing, and hope wilted. ‘No, I suppose ye would not.’
    ‘Are the infants—’
    But he had turned and strode off.
    So it had happened here, too. But … what had happened? Infants put into the quiescent trance of the Dead, but here in the land of the living. How long ago?
    All at once I had to know. Did the babes relapse into mindlessness, then wither from lack of food, and die? If so, this could be no more than a new, terrible disease to which the infant brain was particularly susceptible. But if the children did not wither, if they remained as whole and plump as the Dead did on the other side, then this was no mortal illness.
    I ran after Kah so fast that Hunter gave a startled bark and then a great bound to catch up. ‘Kah! How long ago did the babes here—’
    He turned and stared at me. ‘How do ye know my name?’
    ‘I … you told it to me!’
    ‘I did not. Do I know ye?’ He squinted at my face, and my heart began a long slow thud in my chest. ‘Ye do look familiar, lad …’
    ‘I don’t think so. But I … I heard your name at the inn. From some boys in the stableyard, who wish to come to your performance.’
    ‘Oh.’ He scanned the forlorn faire. ‘Then where be these boys?’
    ‘I don’t know. But can you tell me if the babes—’
    ‘Pox on the babes!’ Again he strode off.
    I let him go. I could not stay here at Stonegreen. If Kah had almost recognized me, then