A Time of Blood (Of Blood and Bone #2) - John Gwynne Page 0,39
sitting and gazing into the fire like some oak-carved statue.
“What is it?” Bleda said to him, leaning up on an elbow.
Does he think me weak, for not standing up to Kol, for calling him lord?
Ellac looked at him, but said nothing, then looked back to the fire. With a sigh, Bleda lay down, rolling over with his back to Ellac. Sleep took a long time to come, despite the soporific crackle and pop of the fire as it slowly faded. He reached inside his cloak, found what he was looking for and pulled it out carefully, opening his palm in the dying fire-glow.
A large feather, dapple grey, and, folded within it, a purple flower of mountain thyme. He lay there looking at it, thinking, until sleep claimed him.
Drassil was ahead of them; tall and foreboding, banners snapping in the breeze from towers and walls, the silhouettes of Ben-Elim circling lazily above it. Six days of riding it had taken them to reach the ancient fortress, and Bleda felt his breath coming faster, a tension in his shoulders as he rode through the huge field of cairns that spread across the plain before the western gates.
Kol ordered horns blown as they crossed the field of cairns, and horn blasts echoed out from the gate tower in response.
All cannot go back to how it was—it must not. The world is changing.
“My mother must know of what is happening here,” he whispered to Ellac, leaning close to the old warrior, who was riding beside him.
Ellac looked at him, his heavy-lidded eyes unreadable, though Bleda had the distinct impression that Bleda was appraising him.
“I sent word to her the day we took Riv from Drassil,” Ellac said. “My Prince,” he added.
Over a moon ago, closer to two. Then word should have reached her in Arcona by now, or soon will. Did Ellac do it to help me, or report on me? Is he my mother’s spy?
“Good,” he said to Ellac.
With a heavy creak and grinding, Drassil’s gates opened. Kol and some of his Ben-Elim flew over the gatehouse, more horns echoing out from the vast walls. Aphra led her White-Wings marching through the gate tunnel. Bleda followed, the clip of his horse’s hooves echoing on the stone, and then they were in the courtyard, a small host arrayed to greet them: Ben-Elim and White-Wings, all manner of stablehands and servants. And then Bleda saw others, dark-skinned warriors with shaved heads and long warrior braids, for a moment thought they were the remnants of his warrior-guard that had not accompanied him into Forn Forest. But then he saw their deel tunics were blue, not grey, and realized that they were of the Cheren Clan, not the Sirak.
And he saw a young woman standing at their head, dark-haired, straight-backed and strong-shouldered, her features fine and sharp.
Jin.
A weight like a lead ball fell in the pit of Bleda’s stomach as he remembered.
I have not thought of her for over a moon.
Jin strode forwards, two of her warrior-guard at her shoulder. She stopped before Bleda, looked up at him as he dismounted.
“Welcome back to Drassil, my betrothed,” she said.
CHAPTER TWELVE
DREM
Drem clamped his jaws together, trying to stop them from chattering as he knelt on the forest floor and peered through a carefully manufactured screen of pine branches and shrubs. After crawling from the freezing grasp of the river, he had shivered involuntarily for a whole day and night. Even now, another day on from that, he had to fight the occasional spasm that rippled through his jaws. Cold had seeped into him, deep as his bones, and did not want to relinquish its hold.
They had spent close to a whole day and night in the grip of the river, sheer granite cliffs rising either side of them, Drem lying upon a thick-slabbed sheet of ice, Cullen and Keld upon Hammer’s back as she swam at first, and then spent her energy on trying to stay afloat. Cullen had managed to tie Keld to the huge saddle across Hammer’s back and then cast a rope to Drem, who had tied it about the hilt of his seax and stabbed it deep into the ice raft he’d been clinging to, so that they would not become separated through the dark of night.
It had felt like the longest night of Drem’s life, too terrified of rolling off his makeshift raft or losing his friends to sleep. He had been sure that death was only ever a handful of heartbeats away.