Winter Be My Shield Read Online Free PDF

slept near him in case he needed her during the night, so the girl’s head lay only a foot away from his own pillow, with frost melting in her hair and her lips a pale and bloodless blue.
    Rhia opened the girl’s coat. Beneath it, her clothes were Mesentreian, fastening up the middle with a row of silver buttons. Rhia ripped them open without ceremony and packed the hot stones around her torso, testing each one against her lips first to make sure it wouldn’t burn. One of the buttons rolled over to Isidro’s blankets and he picked it up with his good hand to examine the crest stamped into the metal.
    Once all the stones were packed around her body, Rhia covered her with a pile of furs. Then, while she gently pulled off the girl’s mittens and gloves, Lakua did the same with her boots and boot liners and pressed the girl’s bare feet against her belly to warm them.
    Cam had shrugged off his coat and stood in the cool spot by the doorway as he gulped down a bowl of lukewarm tea. Isidro tried to speak to him, but barely got the first word out before the cough took him over again. Each racking spasm sent searing needles stabbing through his shattered arm. Rhia glanced at him over her shoulder and said, ‘Eloba, brew tea for Isidro —’
    â€˜I’ll do it,’ said Cam, crossing the tent to the stove and the low table behind it, where the medicines Rhia had ground and mixed were waiting in a bowl ready to be steeped. Cam filled it from the kettle on the stove, added a generous dollop each of butter and honey and brought it to Isidro, who was still struggling to catch his breath. Cam tried to hide it, but Isidro could see the worry in his face.
    â€˜Go ahead and say it,’ he rasped. ‘I look like crap.’
    â€˜You look as bad as she does,’ Cam said, nodding to the patient in Rhia’s furs. ‘She has an excuse. I thought you were getting better.’
    â€˜He was out in the cold waiting for you,’ Rhia said without looking around. ‘I tell him to go in, but your brother is more stubborn than any mule.’ She was still not quite fluent in Ricalani and her grasp of the language always suffered when she was under stress. Cam and Isidro both spoke Mesentreian, her preferred language, but the others did not, and the language of their enemies made them uneasy.
    â€˜Any sign of danger out there?’ Isidro said as he sipped the brew.
    Cam shook his head.
    â€˜Where did you find her?’ Isidro nodded towards the woman.
    â€˜I tracked her to her camp after she raided one of my snares,’ Cam said. ‘But where she came from?’ He shrugged. ‘She had a Ricalani pony, but she was wearing a Mesentreian uniform under that coat.’
    â€˜Not just any uniform,’ Isidro said, and nodded at the button lying on his furs.
    Cam raised one eyebrow and then leaned across him to pick it up. The silver button was stamped with the sigil of a flaming torch. ‘The Angessovar crest,’ he said, rolling it between his fingers. ‘That’s odd.’ Only someone attached to the royal household would wear that crest.
    The inner clothes she had worn were made of the soft black wool used by the king’s household guard, but it lacked the frogging and insignia Isidro remembered from his time at court.
    â€˜Interesting,’ said Cam, and tucked the button away into his sash. ‘So what do you think? She could be a concubine who took advantage of the bad weather to slip away.’
    â€˜Maybe,’ Isidro said. The coughing fit had left him exhausted, and the soporific in Rhia’s brew was taking effect. He was finding it hard to focus on the girl’s face — it wavered and blurred before his eyes. ‘Whoever she is, she must have been desperate, to leave without shelter or supplies.’
    â€˜Hmm,’ Cam said. ‘Well, I hope she can give us some word of what’s going on out there.’
    Rhia