Tamlyn Read Online Free PDF Page A

said. ‘Keep it, Silvermay. You look so pretty in it,’ she added.
    Even though her comment didn’t sound like a compliment, I blushed, which made Tamlyn laugh. Mrs Wenn ignored my half-hearted attempts to refuse her offer and so I left her cottage in a better dress than I had ever worn in my life. I felt Tamlyn’s eyes upon me every time he looked my way, and it wasn’t an unpleasant feeling.
    Despite Tamlyn’s assurance that the shepherd’s hut wasn’t far, it took us almost an hour to reach it and much of the way was uphill. I was exhausted by the time Tamlyn knocked at the door, bringing the shepherd’s wife to greet us warily.
    Tamlyn had warned me, but what I saw when we entered the cottage still wrenched a terrible cry from me. Even in the half-dark, I could see the livid cutsto his face, which still bled in places. The shepherd’s wife had done what she could, with strips of cloth for bandages, but all were stained red and in need of changing.
    â€˜Oh Ryall, what have they done to you?’
    The sound of my voice roused him. He turned his head to find me and I saw that one eye was mostly closed by the angry swelling of his cheek. ‘Silvermay, I knew you’d come,’ he said and managed a grotesque smile. There was no question of him standing up to share a hug, let alone walking, and when he did shift painfully on the pallet where he lay, his left arm seemed entirely useless.
    â€˜We’ll beat them,’ he whispered, but after this flash of defiance he lapsed into the sleep of someone who simply didn’t have the energy to do anything else.
    â€˜He can’t stay here, he needs care,’ I said.
    The shepherd kindly unearthed a wooden handcart he no longer used and we lifted Ryall, groaning through his sleep, into it and set out with Tamlyn at the handles. It was a roughly made cart, and the track back to Greystone was even rougher, which meant poor Ryall was soon forced awake by the constant jerks and buffeting. By the time we were once again at Mrs Wenn’s door, he’d gone as pale as a corpse. Although his eyes remained open and his mouth triedvaliantly to smile, I knew the journey had brought him a step closer to death.
    â€˜I’ve sent for the apothecary,’ said Mrs Wenn once we had him settled near the fire on a mattress brought from upstairs.
    The man arrived soon after, but I quickly decided his haste was because of the money he hoped to make from the strangers in town. He wore a grubby apron over his shirt and trousers, like a blacksmith, or worse, a slaughter man. He’d brought with him a bag full of bottles that clacked against one another as he set it down. This was more encouraging because it reminded me of my mother’s sack full of wonders that cured so many ills in our village, but that was where the comparison ended. This charlatan was little more than a seller of potions, and when I heard him muttering strange verses over Ryall’s damaged body I realised he hoped witchcraft would mend him.
    â€˜Get out,’ I told him. ‘I’ll heal him myself.’
    When we refused to pay him for coming, he gave himself away even more starkly. ‘Your friend is as good as dead. You might as well dig his grave because he won’t last a week. Not even the greatest doctors in the land could save him.’
    It was foolish of me to boast of healing Ryall myself. All I knew about healing came from watching mymother. She hadn’t studied the great books of anatomy as a doctor would — like me, my mother couldn’t read — but I would match her against the best healers in the land. The apothecary’s dire words helped to confirm what had been in my mind from the beginning.
    â€˜He needs Birdie. We have to take Ryall back to Haywode.’
    Tamlyn cared for Ryall as much as I did, but he was a Wyrdborn who put practical matters before sentiment and blind hope. ‘Don’t you remember how