The Rose of Blacksword Read Online Free PDF

gown.”
    “Be quiet and cooperate,” she replied, somewhat heartened that he might not be too seriously hurt. When his grip on the dagger slackened, she picked up the weapon with two fingers. Grimacing with disgust, she wiped it as clean as she could in a clump of new ferns. She quickly used it to tear two strips from her kirtle and then fashioned a bandage for his head. When she finished, he smiled weakly at her.
    “Many thanks, milady.” He struggled to sit up but would not have succeeded without her help. Although he tried to hide it, she could not miss his grimace of pain. “I must get you to safety,” he muttered, staring a little vacantly about the dense forest stand.
    “You’re the one needs tending,” Rosalynde countered as she also looked around, trying to take stock of their situation. “I need water to properly wash that gash in your head.” She bit her lip in consternation as she pondered the problem.
    “There’s the river,” he pointed out.
    “No!” Rosalynde was quick to reply. “It’s too easy for those awful men to find us if we venture down to the water’s edge.” A bird swooped through the trees and they both jumped. Rosalynde watched as it headed up toward the ruined castle that still guarded the hillside. A faint smile curved her lips as an idea formed in her head. “That castle must have had a well. We’ll go up there—”
    “You heard what the knights said,” Cleve protested with rising strength. “ ’Tis a haunted place. It would be foolish to enter such a place of death.”
    Unfazed by his dire warning, Rosalynde got to her feet. Her hose were in tatters. Her gown was ripped and still wet. Even her sturdy cape had a huge rent along one side.But she was alive and so was Cleve. The threat of ghosts seemed far less a problem than the very real threat they had already encountered that day.
    “Those ghosts will be our protection,” she stated confidently as she bent to help him up. Cleve only stared at her with wide doubting eyes.
    “They’ll smother us in our sleep,” he warned even as she put an arm about his waist and helped him start forward. “They’ll sit on our chests and suck the life from us.”
    “They’ll keep anyone else from following us,” she retorted, although a small quiver of doubt snaked up her spine. “We mean them no harm. Surely they’ll know that.”
    Cleve’s expression was dubious. But as he had no better suggestion and was feeling exceedingly weak from the blow to his head, he leaned upon her. Crouching low, and with many backward glances, they slowly made their way toward the abandoned adulterine.

3
    It was not the moans of unhappy ghosts nor the threat of menacing specters that tormented Rosalynde through the long hours of the night. She was not threatened by visions of the dead Sir Medwyn and his hapless wife as she huddled in the roofless remains of what must have been one of the kitchen’s stores. She was instead gripped with fear for the feverish Cleve and haunted anew by the more recent deaths she had witnessed.
    Nelda had not wanted to come on this trip. But because Rosalynde had insisted on traveling to her father herself, a maid had become necessary. If not for Rosalynde’s adamant demand to go to her father herself, Nelda would still be alive, as would the four unlucky knights. Although she had seen only three bodies, Rosalynde could not banish the sight from her mind’s eye, and she was certain everyone else in the party had also been murdered. And all because of her, she worried guiltily. Their poor souls had not even been dignified with a Christian burial.
    Now Cleve was in a very bad way as well.
    “Sweet Mary, mother of Jesus,” she prayed with an urgency that clutched at her very soul. “Save this boy, I beseech thee. Have pity on him, for he does not deserve to die.”
    Through the moonless black of the night, as unseenbeasts rustled nearby and others howled from afar, she kept her lonely vigil. But try as she might