Taming the Beast Read Online Free PDF Page B

there was no fanfare, no bustling serfs attending the castle’s business either on foot or in cart. In the cloud-covered gloom of that rainy and cold afternoon, no harker so much as called out a warning.
    Not even the sound of a footstep could be heard from beyond the curtain wall. Only the lonely wind, skimming the gray stones.
    Roderick adjusted in his saddle onto his screaming left hip once more and clucked his weary horse over the drawbridge, wordlessly prompting Hugh to follow. Young Leo began to cry in earnest as they passed into the barbican.
    The inner bailey of Cherbon was more derelict than its exterior. Vines ran their wicked, tangled maze here, as well, almost like a plague of vegetation had been visited upon the castle, and the old, crackling growth seemed a carpet of despair. Strewn about the ground were bits of broken furniture, barrels that had burst their staves as if dropped and left to lay where they had vomited their contents, now long picked over by scavengers. Shattered jugs and wedges of pottery—Roderick saw a jagged piece with the Cherbon crest cleaved where it had broken. He saw a length of once-costly and now weather-faded cloth—perhaps a piece of the drapery belonging behind the lord’s table in the great hall.
    Roderick walked his horse through the crackling, crunching litter of the bailey, around the great tower of the keep toward the entrance of the hall. He stopped and put his back to the south wall, also covered in choking vines to the battlements and wallwalk above. Over the keep, between where Roderick stood and the hidden inner courtyard, a gossamer finger of wood smoke struggled to scratch at the low blanket of sky. A crow cawed. Roderick let the reins fall from his hands and grasped his left leg below his knee. Using his right fist, he beat his boot backward out of the stirrup, and prepared to lift his leg over the pommel.
    Hugh was off his own horse in a blink, and Roderick felt a familiar pinch of jealousy at the man’s ease of movement, even with stout little Leo strapped to his back.
    â€œOne moment, Rick. I’ll get—”
    â€œI can do it,” Roderick growled.
    â€œDon’t be an ass,” Hugh snapped, searching beneath the vines for a chunk of discarded firewood, left to rot where it had been dropped. He wrested it away from the greedy vines, Leo now silent, and brought it to Roderick’s right side, where he stood the wide length on its end. “We’ve been astride all the day. With as stiff as you are upon dismounting, you’d break your only good leg. And then where would you be, I ask?”
    Roderick had no reply, for of course, Hugh was right. He grasped Hugh’s shoulder and stepped onto the wobbly wooden pylon. Holding his nearly useless leg aloft, he made the short hop to the ground, pain shooting up the muscles of his buttocks and to either side of his spine, all the same. Then, for naught but petulant spite, Roderick kicked the wood length over with his left boot and bit back the painful cry it elicited in his knee.
    Roderick pulled the walking stick from the sheath that at one time had held his broadsword and extended it. Leaning heavily, he snatched up the horse’s reins with wide, awkward sweeps of his free arm and tugged his mount toward the bailey well. Once there, he found that the bucket was missing several planks and the hemp rope had rotted nearly in two.
    Roderick threw the useless garbage to the vines with a crash and a growl, where it splintered completely. He turned and jerked the horse toward the doorway of the hall, his stomach in painful knots.
    He told himself it was not fear he felt. Only anticipation. Relief for the end of their long, long journey.
    â€œGoing in now, are we?” Hugh called as Roderick ducked through the doorway, pulling his horse onto the cobbled floors after him.
    The hall was darker and, oddly enough, colder than the bailey, although a pitiful fire burned in the giant,