The Godless Read Online Free PDF Page A

flat on my feet and it took a few steps to find my balance. If your swings had been a little more controlled, you might have had me.”
    Her eyebrow rose. “Might?”
    â€œWell.” Half a smile lifted his right cheek. “In a real fight, I probably would have cheated.”
    Despite herself, Ayae laughed.
    â€œLearn to juggle.” The big man handed the sword back to Jaerc. “Anything that helps with your hand-eye coordination won’t hurt.”
    Before she could ask him if he was serious, he nodded and walked through the crowd ringed around him. The men and women in leather followed him, except for one. He did not have the look of a mercenary about him: he wore a simple, loose-fitting shirt, his trousers tucked into riding boots. His plain, pale face and brown hair had nothing to recommend it and Ayae was not sure why he had caught her eye.
    â€œDo you know who that is?” Jaerc asked.
    â€œHim?” She turned, and saw he was looking at the big black man heading toward the podium. “No.”
    â€œThat was the exiled baron, Bueralan Le, Captain of Dark.”
    Shrugging, not having the background knowledge about mercenary groups to be able to share Jaerc’s awe, Ayae turned back toward the other man who had been staring at her, but he was gone.

 
    3.
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    According to the friends of the disgraced Baron of Kein, Bueralan’s greatest character flaw was that after seventeen years in exile, he showed no remorse. One day, his enemies said, it would be the death of him.
    Beneath the steely gaze of Captain Heast, that assessment—inaccurate, the subject of it had said more than once—returned to Bueralan. His lack of so-called remorse arose from the fact that he did not often think himself wrong, but he knew he had overstepped his boundaries with the girl he was walking away from. Heast, loyal, pragmatic, professional and capable of shocking coldness, did not appreciate others breaking his discipline, and would remember that: the captain had long ago earned the reputation as a man who had a library of memories, each of them meticulously annotated and referenced.
    â€œI see the wilds and my cousin have taught you nothing,” the Captain of the Spine said evenly as the podium’s stairs creaked beneath Bueralan’s weight. “I was hoping for humility, at the very least.”
    â€œOnly in death.”
    Their handshake was strong, firm.
    â€œShe shows promise,” Bueralan said. “A lot of promise.”
    â€œThe apprentices of cartographers are not here for careers in warfare.” Heast’s gaze swept over the men and women behind the exiled baron. “Your people can retire to the North Keep’s barracks.”
    Dark waited down the stairs, five in number, a mix of nationalities and ages clothed in aged, stained leather and bearing close-quarter weapons. Zean, who was all the family that Bueralan had left, stood at their head, tall and lean, an ugly knife on each hip and more hidden. Behind him stood the oldest, Kae, a pale-skinned swordsman who stood taller than Zean and whose left hand was missing the two smallest fingers. The sisters, Aerala and Liaya, dark-haired and olive-skinned, stood next to him, the first holding a longbow in her hands, while the second, younger and slightly smaller, carried a worn satchel over her sword. And lastly, at the end, stood Ruk, a white man with mud-colored hair whose most blessed attribute was not the sword he carried but rather that he had nothing of note to distinguish him from another man on the street, not even when he spoke.
    As a whole, they were formidable, dangerous, but to Bueralan they looked mostly tired. It was not the journey that left them so, but the last job. Paid by a small lord in the equally small kingdom of Ille, the mercenary group had been hired for work that had been mean and dispiriting, a month spent cutting out the heart of a peasant rebellion in the poverty stricken