To Kill a Kettle Witch (Novel of the Mist-Torn Witches) Read Online Free PDF Page B

the man driving it.
    Like Jaromir, he set the brake and jumped down.
    “Céline,” he said simply.
    She found she couldn’t answer. The man standing before her was tall and tightly muscled. His coal black hair hung down past his collar, and his black eyes searched her face. She would never have described him as handsome. He was . . . beautiful. There was something almost feral about him, as if he didn’t belong inside any four walls.
    Marcus Marentõr.
    The previous summer, Céline, Amelie, and Jaromir had traveled north to the silver mines of a place called Ryazan. They’d been asked to solve an ugly situation up there for Anton’s father. Some of the soldiers who were overseeing the mines had begun turning into mad wolves.
    The sisters had uncovered the mystery, but in theprocess, they’d come to know a group of Móndyalítko who’d basically become enslaved there, trapped with no horses to pull their wagons and forced to work in the mines.
    Marcus was one of them. He and Céline had come to depend upon each other during that crisis, and as the nights passed, they’d found themselves more and more drawn to each other. But Céline allowed nothing to happen between them. Somehow, for some reason she couldn’t explain, it would have felt disloyal to Anton.
    When the time had come to travel home again, Jaromir arranged for the Móndyalítko group to leave that awful place and come to Sèone. They’d been given an abandoned plot of land well outside the walls of the village. It had a cottage and a small barn. The family now worked the land. Half the crops went to Prince Anton, and they kept half to sell or use for their own purposes.
    This must have been a difficult adjustment for a group of natural travelers, but they’d been desperate to escape Ryazan and to make a home, and they’d jumped at the offer.
    Céline hadn’t seen Marcus since.
    “What are you doing here?” she asked.
    A flicker of surprise passed across his face. Perhaps he’d expected a different greeting.
    “The lieutenant asked me,” he answered. “He said you needed a ruse, and that you needed help.”
    With that, everything became clear to Céline.
    After a night of planning with Helga, Jaromir had ridden out that morning and gone to visit the Marentõrs.He must have explained what was happening in Yegor and asked to borrow the wagons, horses, and, for some reason, Marcus.
    Turning to Jaromir, Céline asked, “What about other guards?”
    “Helga says this is better,” he answered “and I agree. Anyone of quality will ignore us, and bandits don’t normally bother with Móndyalítko. Too much trouble for too little reward. But Marcus, Amelie, and I can handle any problems that do arise.”
    He sounded so certain.
    Céline tried to grasp the change of circumstance. So, just the five of them, she, Amelie, Helga, Jaromir, and Marcus, would be traveling in close quarters all the way to Yegor, and then somehow convince the Móndyalítko there that they were a bonded group who had formed their own family. For some reason she couldn’t name, she didn’t care for the idea of living with Marcus for what might be as long as a month.
    As she was about to ask a few more questions, she noticed Helga studying Marcus warily. The aging woman even sniffed the air.
    He looked back at her. “Do I know you?”
    “How long since you spent a summer in Yegor?” she asked.
    He tilted his head. “Four years.”
    “I haven’t been in five,” Helga said. “You’d have been young to pay much notice to an old woman like me.”
    While that might be an unfair assessment of Marcus, it also might be true. Céline guessed him to be about twenty-five.
    He motioned to his chest and said, “Marcus of the family Marentõr.”
    Helga nodded back. “Helga of the family Ayres.”
    This was the first time Céline had ever heard Helga’s family name.
    “Yes, I know of your family,” Marcus said. “You must know mine. My aunt was the great