Warrior Scarlet Read Online Free PDF Page A

you ran from, into the forest?’ the words would never come. So there was no good thinking about it.
    The light was growing all around them, wherever the trees fell back a little; moonlight and dawn-light watered together; and as they came down to a narrow brook a willow wren was singing among the alders. They followed upstream a little way, and suddenly Drem knew where he was. He knew this brook, he knew the ancient willow bending far out over the water, where the brook broke up into a chain of pools. Just up yonder through the trees was the track, the ancient track under the scarp of the downs that echoed the Ridgeway along the High Chalk far above. Even as he realized it, they came out on the edge of a clearing, and Talore checked among a tangle of elder bushes with a swift gesture that halted boy and hounds alike.
    Ahead of them in the clearing the light was so strong that already the foxgloves were touched with colour; and the low ground-mist of the summer morning lay like gossamer in the hollows among the fern. And peering, breath in check, through the low-hanging elder branches, Drem saw that on the far side of the clearing a herd of roe deer were grazing, theirfawns all together at a little distance. One big hind was grazing a little apart from the rest, between them and the elder scrub; and Drem judged that she was well within spear throw, knowing that in the hands of a skilled hunter a light throw-spear could kill at forty or fifty paces. One of the hounds was standing against his leg, and he felt the tremors running through the brute’s body, though no whimper of excitement broke from him, or from the other two. They had come on the herd upwind, and so there was nothing to carry the smell of danger to the deer, and they grazed on undisturbed. Every moment Drem expected to see Talore throw and make his kill; but the moments passed, and when he stole a sideways glance at Talore, the hunter was watching the herd through the white curds of the elder blossom, with a keen, quiet pleasure narrowing his dark eyes, and the throw-spear still at rest in his hand.
    A few moments later, he gave a soft whistle. A curious, low note at sound of which the nearest hind raised her head and looked towards the elder tangle, then began, obviously not in the least startled, to drift back to the main herd. One or two others looked up and began to drift also, a hind barked to her fawn, and in a few moments the last of the deer had melted into the trees and the morning mist.
    Drem looked again at Talore, puzzled, and spoke for the first time since they had set out on the home trail. ‘You could have killed her—the one this side of the herd.’
    ‘So. Very easily.’ Talore had been on the point of moving again, but he checked, looking down at the boy.
    ‘Then—why not?’
    ‘I have killed once already tonight and have no need to kill again,’ Talore said. ‘There is meat enough in my house-place, and a deer-skin fetches but a small price from the traders.’ And then, seeing Drem still puzzled, ‘Never kill what you cannot use. If you kill for skins, kill for all the skins you need; if for food, fill your belly and the bellies of hound and woman and child at your hearth and set store by, that they may be full another time. But to kill for the sake of killing is the way of theweasel and the fox, and the hunter who kills so angers the Forest Gods. Let you remember that when you are a man and hunt with the Men’s side!’
    Drem had not meant to say it, a moment before he would not have thought that he could say it, but the words seemed to burst out past the silence in his throat in a small, hoarse rush that had nothing to do with his will. ‘Most like, when I am a man, I shall not hunt with the Men’s side.’
    There was a pause, and a little wind riffled through the elder branches, fetching down a shower of petals. Then Talore said, ‘Who with, then?’
    ‘The Half People.’
    ‘And who says so?’
    ‘The Old One, Cathlan my