Teresa Medeiros - [FairyTale 02] Read Online Free PDF

like the hungry growl of some great beast’s belly. Although she’d steeled herself for its arrival, she stillflinched when the first cold drops of rain struck her face.
    The fat drops made the mob’s torches sizzle and sputter, and Gwendolyn could smell the stench of damp pitch.
    Ross and Ailbert marched on either side of her, herding her along the steep, narrow path that twisted its way up the cliffside. Gwendolyn gazed straight ahead, until the forbidding shadow of Castle Weyrcraig fell over them.
    The fortress crowned the cliff, eerily beautiful even in its decay. On this night there were no lights flickering through its hollow rooms, no ghostly wail of bagpipes to welcome them. Yet the place that had once been Gwendolyn’s cherished castle of dreams had become the stuff of nightmares, filling her with dread. Ailbert swore beneath his breath and even Ross’s beefy limbs betrayed him with a tremor. As they shoved her back into motion, Gwendolyn stumbled for the first time since they had seized her.
    As they left behind the sheltering walls of the glen, the full fury of the storm broke over them. Rain lashed at Gwendolyn, plastering the thin linen robe to her body and soaking her to the bone. The wind set up a shrill howl as the driving rain extinguished the last of the torches, leaving them in near darkness. Hastening their steps, the villagers scanned the sky, as if expecting their doom to swoop down out of the churning clouds on wings of flame.
    Ross gave her a harsh jerk, and Gwendolyn went down hard on one knee. She ignored the sharp pain and forced herself to keep moving, fearful the mob might trample her. Their panic had become a palpable thing—a metallic bitterness at the back of her throat. She didn’t know whether to be terrified or thankful when the remnants of the iron gates that had been shattered by English cannon fire nearly fifteen years before emerged from the shadows ahead of them.
    This time it wasn’t Gwendolyn, but the villagers who faltered.
    Until this night, all of the offerings to the Dragon had been left outside the gates. Except for a handful of lads bold or foolish enough to accept a dare from their less courageous peers, no one had passed between those gates since that bleak morning fifteen years ago when the villagers had carried the bodies of their laird and his family down the hillside.
    For a moment, Gwendolyn believed she might be saved. Believed they would not dare to breach the unholy sanctuary of the castle courtyard.
    But that was before Ross wrenched one of the gates right off its rusty hinges. Rain coursed like tears down Ailbert’s gaunt cheeks as he shouted, “Let’s have done with it, then!”
    Gwendolyn began to struggle in earnest as they drove her through the gates. She had time to collect only a few scattered impressions—stone walls covered with damp lichen; a headless statue of a woman garbedin flowing marble; a set of broad flagstone steps leading up to a splintered door.
    Once they’d dragged her into the heart of the courtyard, it didn’t take Ross long to find a hole in the crumbling, weed-choked cobblestones. Lachlan handed him a sledgehammer and with one mighty swing, Ross drove a tall stake into the ground.
    Ailbert secured Gwendolyn’s hands behind her, cast a rope around her chest, waist, and thighs to bind her to the thick shaft of wood, then muttered, “May God have mercy on yer soul, lass.”
    “If you leave me here, it won’t be
my
soul needing mercy, but yours,” she bit off through her chattering teeth. “Especially if I perish from exposure and you return to find nothing but my bones.”
    “The Dragon’ll be pickin’ his teeth with ‘em before the morn,” Ross snarled.
    Before she could spit in his face, the sky exploded. A forked tongue of flame descended from the heavens, followed by the thunderous crack of a serpentine tail.
    “ ‘Tis the Dragon!” a woman screamed. “He’s comin’ for her!”
    A mighty roar seemed to pour