The Battle for Skandia Read Online Free PDF Page A

that froze his heart in midbeat.
    There was the clear imprint of a horse’s hooves in the snow—and they overlay the tracks that Evanlyn had left. Someone had followed her.
    Forgetting his weariness, Will ran, half crouching, through the thick pines to the spot where the first snare had been laid. The snow there was disturbed and scuffed. He fell to his knees, trying to read the story that was written there.
    The empty snare first: he could see where Evanlyn had reset the noose, smoothing the snow around it and scattering a few grains of seed. So there had been an animal in the snare when she’d arrived.
    Then he cast wider, seeing the other set of footprints moving into position behind her as she had knelt, engrossed in the task of resetting the snare and probably jubilant at the fact that they had caught something. The horse’s tracks had stopped some twenty meters away. Obviously, the animal was trained to move silently—much as Ranger horses were. He felt an uneasy sense of misgiving at that. He didn’t like the idea of an enemy who had those sorts of skills—and by now he knew he was dealing with an enemy of some kind. The signs of the struggle between Evanlyn and the enemy were all too clear to his trained eye. He could almost see the man—he assumed it was a man—moving quietly behind her, grabbing her and dragging her back through the snow.
    The wild disturbance of the ground showed how Evanlyn had kicked and struggled. Then, suddenly, the struggling had stopped and two shallow furrows in the snow led back to where the horse waited. Her heels, he realized, as her unconscious body had been dragged away.
    Unconscious? Or dead, he thought. And a chill hand seized his heart at the thought. Then he shook it away determinedly.
    â€œNo sense in carrying her away if he’d killed her,” he told himself. And he almost believed it. But he still had that gnawing uncertainty in the pit of his belly as he followed the horse’s tracks back to the main trail, and then in the opposite direction of the trail that led back to the cabin.
    He was glad he’d thought to bring the blankets. It was going to be a cold night, he thought. He was also glad that he’d thought to bring the bow, although he found himself wishing that he still had the powerful recurve bow that he had lost at the bridge in Celtica. It was a far superior weapon to the low-powered Skandian hunting bow. And he had the uncomfortable certainty that he was going to need a weapon in the very near future.

5
    THE WORLD WAS UPSIDE DOWN AND BOUNCING. GRADUALLY, As Evanlyn’s eyes came into focus, she realized that she was hanging, head down, her face only centimeters away from the front left shoulder of a horse. The inverted position made the blood pound painfully in her head, a pounding that was accentuated by the steady, bouncing trot that the horse was maintaining. He was a chestnut, she noted, and his coat was long and shaggy and badly in need of grooming. The small area she could see was matted with sweat and dried mud.
    Something hard ground into the soft flesh of her belly with every lurching step the horse took. She tried to wriggle to relieve the pressure and was rewarded for her efforts with a sharp blow to the back of her head. She took the hint and stopped wriggling.
    Turning her head to face toward the rear, she could make out her captor’s left leg—clad in a long, skirt-like fur coat and soft hide boots. Below her, the churned snow of the trail passed rapidly by. She realized her unconscious body had been slung unceremoniously across the front of a saddle. That projection stabbing dully into her stomach must be the pommel.
    She remembered now: the slight noise behind her, the blur of movement as she started to turn. A hand, stinking of sweat and smoke and fur, clamped over her mouth to prevent her screaming. Not that there had been anyone within earshot to hear, she thought regretfully.
    The