Brothers' Fury (Bleeding Land Trilogy 2) Read Online Free

Mun replied, walking over, letting go of Hector’s bridle so that he could slide his sword through a scrap of cloth torn from a rebel’s shirt.
    ‘You devil! You gave us no opportunity to surrender,’ the man protested as Mun tossed the bloody rag aside. He was in his thirties, clean-shaven, clear-eyed and with a strong jaw that Mun guessed had been honed to sharp edges by the yelling of commands. He did not seem afraid, which might have been surprising given that his newly raised troop lay butchered before it had ever served Parliament’s cause. Yet good commanders knew that fear spread like fire. Good officers learned to smother it, whether in the presence of their own men or the enemy.
    ‘Would you have allowed us to surrender?’ Mun asked, holding the man’s eye, and to the rebel’s credit he held his tongue rather than lie. ‘No you would not,’ Mun confirmed, ‘and if we had given you warning and thus chance to properly defend yourselves, your men would still be dead now’ – he pointed his sword at a rebel whose lifeless face was a blood-sheeted grimace – ‘but many of mine would be corpses too.’ Mun shrugged, pushing his blade back into its scabbard. ‘This is your reward for treason,’ he said. ‘Death is your payment for taking up arms against your king.’
    ‘You mean to murder us in cold blood?’ The man was wide-eyed, the bridle slipping off his fear at last.
    Mun shook his head. ‘Not me,’ he said, glancing up at the wan sky, his breath rising in a cloud. He turned to the rest of his troop who were still plundering the dead. ‘Shear House men, mount up! We have done our work here.’
    ‘You’re going to leave us out here like this?’ the rebel leader asked, ignoring Cole’s growled threat to take off his buff-coat or else die with it on. Goffe, Harley and even young Godfrey were working fast, relieving the stunned rebels of food, spare clothing, tinder boxes, flints and steel, bottles, blankets and money; stripping them as thoroughly as a dog paring flesh from a bone. ‘We’ll freeze to death,’ the man declared as his men looked to each other fearfully. ‘The nearest village is ten miles east. If we don’t find it before dark we’ll die.’
    ‘There’s a village called Longridge five miles back that way,’ Mun said, thumbing south, seeing hope spark in the rebel’s eyes. ‘But if I see you there I will kill you. Your only hope lies east. Whalley village.’
    ‘Who are you, you devil?’ the rebel officer asked as he was shoved this way and that by Cole who was pulling his plain buff-coat off him, leaving him clothed merely in shirt and doublet so that much of his white skin was now at the mercy of the biting cold.
    ‘He’s the man that gave you a good hiding,’ O’Brien said at Mun’s shoulder, pouring powder down the muzzle of his wheellock. Some of the rebels grimaced, disgusted though perhaps not surprised to discover that an Irishman had played some part in their destruction.
    ‘My name is Sir Edmund Rivers,’ Mun said, taking hold of his saddle’s cantle and hauling himself up onto Hector’s back. ‘If you do not freeze to death out here you would do well to remember me.’
    ‘Then I shall pray to the Lord, Sir Edmund, that He seesfit to preserve me that I might meet you again and avenge these men whom you have barbarously slaughtered.’ His eight companions lacked their leader’s boldness and either gawked pathetically at their enemies or looked at their shoes.
    Mun regarded the man for a moment, saw that he was beginning to shiver, the raw air sinking teeth into his bones. Part of him was tempted to give the order to kill the prisoners where they stood and be done with the thing. Then his mind dragged up an image of his father lying plundered and stripped in the bloody mire of Edgehill. It was not a memory, for he had never found Sir Francis or Emmanuel after the battle, yet he knew the image to be true all the same.
    Let them freeze, he thought,