Beyond the Gate (The Golden Queen) (Volume 2) Read Online Free Page A

know him, but she’d never seen his likeness before. “I’ll thank you to speak more reverently of the departed, Mr.…?”
    “Thomas Flynn. Your uncle.”
    Maggie glared at him, trying to consider what to say. Her mother had been dead for three years. Her father and brothers had all drowned a year and a half before that. And in all of that time she’d not seen so much as a whisker of Thomas Flynn’s beard nor got a single message expressing his sympathy.
    “That’s right,” Thomas said, “your only kin has come to call. You can close your mouth now.”
    From across the street, the blacksmith cracked a huge smile that barely showed through his bushy black beard. “Will you be giving us a song, Thomas?” he called.
    In answer, Thomas reached behind him and pulled out the rosewood case for his lute, stood, and shook it over his head. “I’ll give you many songs in the days to come!” he shouted, and his coat opened. Beneath it, Maggie could see a beautiful plum-colored shirt tied with a gold belt, pants that were forest green. His outfit was slightly festive, slightly dignified, and slightly absurd—as befitting a minstrel. Indeed, she realized now that he had been striving to draw a crowd by shouting for her from the streets. He was a man of wide repute, a satirist with some reputation for having a quick wit and, as they say in County Morgan, “a tongue sharp enough to slice through bones.”
    Such folk were always good for songs and tales of faraway lands, mixed with a fair amount of political commentary so burning hot that you could use it to scald the hair off a pig.
    Maggie said, “We’ve heard of you—even in this little backwater. Everyone knows Thomas Flynn, who goes about aping the great men of the world.”
    “Aping great men? Oh, heaven forbid! I’d never ape a truly great man.” Thomas grinned, removing his hat to show a full head of close-cropped hair. “They’re too strange and fine a thing. But, now, for those who call themselves ‘great,’ but who are in fact deceivers—those men I will not spare. For through my aping I can sometimes prove that those who call themselves ‘great’ are nothing more than great apes.”
    “So why have you favored us with your presence, Uncle Thomas?” Maggie said in a tone that flatly admitted she wanted to be rid of him quickly.
    “Oh, it’s worried about you that I am, darlin’. Rumors. I’ve been hearing disconcerting things, Maggie. Rumor says you plan to marry a man named Gallen O’Day, even after he prayed to the devil and got your village priest murdered.”
    “Och, and what would you know of it?” Maggie asked. There was far more to the story than she ever planned to tell her uncle—or to anyone else.
    “I’m only repeating the tales that I’ve heard on the road,” Thomas answered, “tales everyone is telling nowadays.
    “Some say that Gallen called upon the devils, unleashing them on the town, and others say that the demons came of their own accord and that Gallen struggled against them until God’s angels came to fight beside him. In the last two weeks, every person in twelve counties has worn out their jaws yapping about it.”
    “Sure, and I suppose you don’t believe such stories?” Maggie challenged, unwilling to so much as venture an opinion about the recent happenings. “So you’ve come to write a song to mock the good folks of Clere—and my beau Gallen, too, I imagine.”
    “Ah,” Thomas said, looking around at the folks in town. “I’ve seen no proof that the accounts are anything more than fables. Why, I just drove forty miles from Baille Sean, and I spotted nothing more menacing than an old red fox that was slinking from pine to pine, hunting partridges. If there be green-skinned demons about, I’ve had no sight of them. And as for the tales of angels or fairy folk with flaming arrows, I’ve seen no flames at all except in my own campfire. If I were called to write a song right now, I’m afraid that I’d