The Pillars of Creation Read Online Free PDF Page A

blue eyes—a shadow of uneasiness not elicited by her expertise with a knife.
    A hint of a smile came in turn to Jennsen’s lips as she watched him considering what manner of dark danger she might represent. “Don’t worry. Only those bringing trouble would have cause to fear being here.”
    He lifted his hands in a gesture of surrender. “Then I’m as safe as a babe in his mother’s arms.”
    Jennsen left Sebastian to wait on the rock while she made her way up the winding path, through sheltering spruce, using twisted roots as steps up, toward her house set back in a clutch of oak on a small shelf in the side of a mountain. The flat patch of grassy ground was, on a better day, a sunny open spot among the towering old trees. There was room enough to yard their goat along with some ducks and chickens. Steep rock to the back prevented any visitors happening upon them from that direction. Only the path up the front provided an approach.
    Should they be threatened, Jennsen and her mother had constructed a well-hidden set of footholds up the back, to a narrow ledge, and out a twisting side way via deer paths that would take them through a ravine and away. The escape route was nearly inaccessible as a way in unless you knew the precise course through the maze of rock walls, fissures, and narrow ledges, and even then they had made certain that key passages were well hidden by strategically placing deadwood and brush they’d planted.
    Ever since Jennsen was young they had moved often, never staying in one place too long. Here, though, where they felt safe, they had stayed for over two years. Travelers had never discovered their mountain hideaway, as sometimes had happened in other places they had stayed, and the people in Briarton, the nearest town, never ventured this far into such a dark and forbidding wood.
    The seldom-used trail around the lake, from where the soldier had fallen, was as close as any trail came to them. Jennsen and her mother had gone into Briarton only once. It was unlikely that anyone even knew they were living out in the vast trackless mountains far from any farmland or city. Except for the chance encounter with Sebastian down closer to the lake, they’d never seen anyone near their place. This was the most secure spot she and her mother had ever had, and so Jennsen had dared to begin to think of it as home.
    Since she was six, Jennsen had been hunted. As careful as her mother always was, several times they had come frighteningly close to being snared. He was no ordinary man, the one who hunted her; he was not bound by ordinary means of searching. For all Jennsen knew, the owl watching her from a high limb as she made her way up the rocky path could be his eyes watching her.
    Just as Jennsen reached the house, she met her mother, throwing her cloak around her shoulders as she came out the door. She was the same height as Jennsen, with the same thick hair to just past her shoulders but more auburn than red. She was not yet thirty-five, and the prettiest woman Jennsen had ever seen, with a figure the Creator Himself would marvel at. In different circumstances, her mother’s life would have been one of countless suitors, some, no doubt, willing to offer a king’s ransom for her hand. Her mother’s heart, though, was as loving and beautiful as her face, and she had given up everything to protect her daughter.
    When Jennsen sometimes felt sorry for herself, for the normal things in life that she couldn’t have, she would then think of her mother, who had willingly given up all those same things and more for the sake of her daughter. Her mother was as close as it came to a guardian spirit in the flesh.
    “Jennsen!” Her mother rushed to her and seized her shoulders. “Oh, Jenn, I was starting to worry so. Where have you been? I was just coming to look for you. I thought you must have had some trouble and I was—”
    “I did, Mother,” Jennsen confided.
    Her mother paused only momentarily; then,