Bard I Read Online Free Page B

They came, intolerably, to the balls of his feet and the toes. His face had long since purpled from a rush of blood to the head; now it was blackening. His skull threatened to burst. The tendons behind his knees felt like whitely glowing wires about to snap.
    Ha!
    His bound hands cleared his toes.
    Gasping, sweaty, he slid his wrists up the rope by which he hung suspended, until his hands were before his face. At the same time he pushed down hard with his legs. Before long, he stood shakily upright while the blood drained from his head and he almost fainted. At last the hollow, singing blackness went away.
    His full weight still bore on his ankles. The difference was that he now stood right way up in his bonds. The long rope ran up from his feet through the circle of his arms, past his face, across the beam and then down to the log.
    He hooked an elbow around the rope, got his face to his bound wrists and began to work on the knot there with his teeth. Something would happen, of course. Some fool would amble in to gawk, discover what he was doing . . . and it would all have been for nothing. He worried the knot until it loosened and gave. With his hands free, he climbed the rope to the overhead beam. There he sat and untied his feet. Moving along the beam on hands and knees, he gained a perch above the curtained entrance, where he’d have the advantage of anybody who did come in. Free, he thought, Free! Unbound and able to move, at any rate!
    What is to be done now?
    If he regained the harp Golden Singer, he could do much. The three enchanted strains she could produce, one for laughter, one for sorrow, and one for sleep, were more powerful weapons in their way than any of edged steel.
    A man lurched in. Most probably he wanted to piss, and did not care to seek the privy in the cold. He should have done. His disinclination to walk outside was his death.
    The bard fell on him with a force that knocked him to his knees. Felimid caught the Jute’s chin in one hand, the back of his head with the other, set a knee in the hollow of his back and wrenched hard. There was the sound of a green branch breaking, and a sort of snuffling grunt from the man’s throat. No more than that.
    The bard shivered slightly as he dropped the corpse. The ease with which it had become one reminded him of the ease with which he too could die. As if he hadn’t had reminders enough! He hated killing, and would always avoid it unless driven by desperation . . . and yet desperation was in him now if it ever had been, making him dangerous.
    Felimid stripped the dead man of his dagger-belt. He wore a cylindrical body-belt of shaggy bearskin, almost two feet from top to bottom, held up by studded buckled straps over his shoulders, and stout boots of walrus hide lined and trimmed with fur. Felimid stripped him of those, too. Dead men’s boots were supposed to be bad luck, but so were frostbitten toes.
    Then Felimid heaved the corpse into the pit. The wolves snarled and fought.
    Thinking quickly, Felimid cut the rope that had been knotted around his ankles, and frayed it to look as if it had parted naturally. The end belayed around the log rail he left where it was. The rest he dropped into the pit. He hoped King Oisc would think it had snapped under the bard’s weight, or frayed over the beam, and that the warrior’s remains were his. The man himself might not be missed until the next day. from what Felimid had seen of Yule feasting among the Jutes.
    Now he must get out. A door lay opposite the curtained entrance; when he tried it, he found it barred on the outside. He wasted no time in frustrated curses. Best to climb back among the roof-beams, and begin cutting an egress through the thatch.
    Then Felimid heard the sound of the bar being lifted. After one convulsive leap. his heart began to hammer at thrice its normal rate. He crouched against the wall.
    The door opened wide enough to let in one person in a long hooded cloak. She saw the dangling rope and