The Sacred Band: Book Three of the Acacia Trilogy Read Online Free PDF

Corinn said, “Send soldiers to the fortress for the children. They are to live, for now, as our hostages.”
    The queen turned around, the links of her chain mail clanking as she did so. General Andeson was staring at her, pale faced. Melio stood beside him, his eyes fixed on the carnage. They recoiled when the stench of burning flesh and offal hit them. The stink and gases of bodies turned inside out was almost too much to bear. Corinn breathed through her mouth. She took her strength from the awe and revulsion and fear in the men’s faces.
    “But these that I’ve eliminated here,” she continued, “burn them all. Reduce what’s left of their corpses to ashes and have them brought back to Acacia. We will mix them with mortar and repave the streets of the lower town with them. From now on, even the humblest peasant will walk atop the remains of the Numrek. Thus it will be for any who oppose me.”
    Andeson’s throat caught. Instead of speaking, he nodded.
    Corinn turned on her heel, satisfied.
    She almost reached the horses before she wavered, stumbled, then fell.

C HAPTER
T WO

    T he Scav met Princess Mena Akaran on a desolate stretch of beach littered with whale bones and dotted with chunks of translucent sea ice. He stood shirtless despite a frigid wind, his scrawny chest exposed and his small, dense muscles pronounced beneath a thin membrane of white-blue skin. His flaxen hair hung limp and matted, plaited in several places with strips of hide. He did not look up as Mena leaped from the landing boat and kicked her way through the froth to the sand. He did not meet her eyes when Gandrel announced her or return the gazes of any of her party. He answered the questions Gandrel put to him in a rough dialect that Mena could not follow at all.
    “He says this is where the Numrek came through,” Gandrel translated. He pointed at the man with one thickly ringed hand, while his other hovered near Mena, as if to keep her from stepping too close to him. He was like that, protective, large as a bear and with a jagged scar across his nose as if he had fought on equal terms with clawed creatures. “Where the Mountains Cry the Sea, he calls it. A narrow pass that leads to a route through the mountains.”
    Mena glanced up at the sheer black rock that rose from the sand, cracked and fissured, marbled with veins of silver flaring here and there. Clouds hung low enough that the tops disappeared into them. Cascades of frothing water poured through numerous crevices, looking like they were draining the sky itself.
    “His people are poets, then,” Mena said. “I wouldn’t have guessed it.”
    “Hardly,” Gandrel said. “They just can’t say things right. He says a little south of here the mountains jut into the sea. Unpassable. The only way through is to go inland via this pass and eventually come down through the Ice Fields.”
    “Can we believe him?” Mena asked.
    Gandrel spoke to the man again, listened to the answer. “He claims his father died here and that many of their clan were killed when they confronted the Numrek. Burned by pitch, butchered.” Gandrel pointed at the man’s chest. “The bones on that necklace are from his father’s right hand. That’s what he says, at least.”
    Mena did not look at the bones. An artery pulsed at the base of the man’s neck. Having noticed it, she found it hard to look away.
    “They fought them?” Mena’s first officer, Perrin, asked. He stood beside the princess, tall and long limbed, nearly as rangy as a Numrek. He would have been imposing, save his face was so clean lined and pretty it seemed suited for an actor, not a soldier. His brown hair was perpetually tousled. This, too, managed to be endearing.
    “So he claims. He comes here sometimes to listen for the ghosts of those who died here. That’s part of how they hunt: they claim the dead guide them.”
    “And did he hear ghosts?” Mena asked.
    After Gandrel translated the question, the Scav’s gaze lifted