The Dark Ferryman Read Online Free PDF Page A

two more tumbled into its place from above. They barked knuckles and ankles and toes more than once, yelping with pain as they skinned their hands and twanged their elbows. Barton wrestled with great enthusiasm as his face grew apple red and sweat dappled his thin tunic darkly. They finally stopped, panting, and looked at one another.
    Barton said, “It’s like wrestling goats, m’lady.” He rubbed hands that must sting on his trousers.
    “You know, you’re right. That’s exactly what it’s like!”
    “You know goats?”
    “Oh, yes. I grew up on a farm and orchard. I spent my days gathering eggs, milking goats, and picking apples for cider,” she told him. If her family were with her now, they’d make short work of moving this rockfall, she thought fondly.
    “But you’re a lady!”
    She looked down at her dust-coated riding skirt and boots, standing in gravel up to her ankles. The cuffs of her shirt she’d rolled back, but red clay and silt had stained them anyway, needlework embroidery likely never to come clean again. “Hardly,” she laughed at herself. “At any rate, this looks like one billy goat I can’t wrestle into the pen.”
    “Maybe.” Barton chewed his lower lip in thought, or perhaps he was merely sucking the salty sweat from it. He jabbed a finger at the boulders. “That one,” he said. “It looks like that one is the one you need to move, if you’re trying to shift the slide in that other direction.”
    She craned her neck. “I think you’re right!” She picked her way carefully over the loose ground to the recalcitrant boulder bigger than both of them put together. A push and a shove hardly made it do more than rock a little in its place. She pulled out her sword, shoved it into a crack beneath it and began to lever it out. The metal made a deep, throbbing sound as she pried at the boulder, and Barton scrambled over to put his scrawny shoulder to the thing. It fought them both, giving a little and then sliding back into position stubborn as if it had an ornery, billy goat mind of its own. She stopped to breathe deep and finally caught Lara’s voice calling up to them.
    “What are you doing up there besides ruining a good sword?” Lariel stood, hands on her hips, head tilted up to them, the glory of her gold-and-silver hair catching the sunlight, her face creased in query. Her blue, gold, and silver eyes flashed in the slanting sun.
    “I’m . . . I have to free this.” She thumped her palm on the rock.
    A very long moment passed. She could see the disapproval flash over her features, quickly followed by a neutral expression. She swallowed, knowing that she had provoked a rare anger. Lara snapped a wave at a guard standing to the rear. “Marten, get up there if you can and help m’lady Rivergrace before she snaps good steel in two and impales herself as well.” She turned about abruptly as if to shut out the sight of Grace and the boy.
    Marten flashed a grin up at Rivergrace, before springing up the rockfall as gracefully as a stag, even with the gravel and sand that loosened under his boots and cascaded down the hillside every which way. He eased her sword from its leveraging position and handed it back to her with a tsk at the notched blade. “Which way?”
    “Thatta way.” Barton jabbed a thumb as he warily gave ground to the guard.
    “All shoulders to it, then.” Marten dug in his heels and true to his order, put his shoulder and hands to it, waited till Grace bent down and then Barton, and they took a deep breath in concert.
    Three heaves and the boulder finally gave, squirreling out of its cradle with a quickness that almost pitched all of them face first, but Marten caught his own balance, then the two of them by the scruff of the neck to save them from going over, as the boulder fell. The rockslide behind it gave way, moving slowly at first and then cascading down furiously. A gurgle sounded behind Rivergrace as water began to trickle up. The guardsman took her by