Worth Dying For (The Bruce Trilogy) Read Online Free PDF Page B

belly flat to a tree and fuck his Scottish arse till he screams with pleasure? Chop off his fingers, one knuckle bone at a time? Gouge out his eyeballs, maybe? I like that one, I do. Won’t be pretty no more, then, will ‘e?” He guffawed, amused by his own cleverness.
    “Let him go.”
    The pig-bellied Englishman stopped laughing. He cocked his head sideways, not daring to take his eyes off me. “What did you – ?”
    A thwack cut off his words. He stumbled forward, as if someone had shoved him from behind. But there was no one there. A line – wet, burning – trickled warm across my abdomen to pool in my navel. The sword had pricked my flesh. It slipped from his grasp and thudded to the ground.
    His tongue popped from his mouth, red foam bubbling around it. He lowered his eyes to gawp at his chest, where the tip of a wooden spear point protruded. Bright blood clotted in the Englishman’s stubbly beard, spurted from the hole in his breast. Empty-eyed, he stared at me, making little croaking sounds – and fell.
    I rolled away. My arm, not yet healed, flared with a bolt of pain. The spear point ripped my sleeve at the shoulder as he crashed against me, knocking the breath from me. Gulping in air, I shoved him aside with a strained heave. The man was dead, for certain, but smelling of his own shit.
    “You could’ve killed me,” I grumbled at Torquil as he stalked toward me.
    With a yank, he pulled the spear out, stifling a curse when the haft split in two. He knelt down and whispered into my ear, “They come.”
    I started to sit up to look around, but he pushed me back down and pointed up the hillside to where a narrow bridle path led through the stand of trees from which he had been cutting spears. Rising on my good elbow, I peered at the rim of the small rise above us.
    “English.” I sank back down. “Ten, maybe twelve. They’ll be looking for this one soon.”
    Torquil’s fingers fluttered on his spear. I retrieved my knife from where it lay. It would be a quick fight if they found us – and not in our favor. I pointed to a thicket of bushes that crowded the nearby bank. Backs hunched to stay low, we dragged the dead man between us and rolled him under a young pine. We crawled deep inside the thicket, thorns lashing at our faces and snagging our shirts. Although their voices drifted clearly down to us, I could understand only snatches of their thick speech. They went by very slowly, pausing once directly above us a hundred feet up the mud-slickened slope.
    As they at last passed to the south, Torquil turned to me. The wind tossed long strands of straw-pale hair from his ruddy face. “They find our horses. Follow us here.”
     
     
    While the sun slipped lazily into the west, they scoured the hillside, twice coming within a spear’s throw. My fingers twitched on my knife, but Torquil kept his weapons idle beside him as they wandered off. Although I took joy in killing Englishmen – for I had never forgotten the terror of Berwick – neither of us was fool enough to deny the odds on this occasion.
    When they had been gone for some time and daylight began to yield to dusk, Torquil and I crept down to the water. The boat that Torquil and I had found was big enough for only a few men. There was a leak somewhere in the stern, but Torquil deemed it slow enough that the boat could easily be bailed out before it took on too much water. Darkness falling, we returned to the cave and told Robert of the scouting party.
    That night, under a moonless sky, we rowed across to the opposite side of the loch in batches. The worst of the wounded – which was only a few by now, the rest having died – were set ashore first. After that went Robert, Gil and I, with Boyd returning the boat to the other side. I was eminently thankful there was no breeze that night and so, but for the sweep and surge of the oars, the boat glided across the surface, parting the mist that mantled the glassy loch. All the same, getting in and