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

King’s men, saw you shot from your horse.’ There was a short heavy silence. ‘I’m sorry if Achilles is gone,’ she said, ‘you loved that horse better than you love most people.’
Better than you love me
, her eyes said. Tom said nothing and Ruth nestled a kiss amongst his hair and pressed her cheek against his head. ‘No one has heard from you since.’
    A short while later he heard Ruth say: ‘Well you’re safe now.’
    And then he had slept.
    Now it was mid March and freezing still, and Tom had resumed his old duties at the Lord, clearing tables, hefting barrels and doing whatever else Abiezer Grey, in grudging tone, asked him to do. Grey had not been cheered to see Tom again, had visibly chafed when Tom had said that he would work for food and fodder for his mare but not for a room, being as he would share Ruth’s bed. But it was more than distaste at the thought of Tom lying with Ruth, more than simple jealousy that Tom had seen in the innkeeper’s eyes. If it was not quite fear it was fear’s cousin, and it was a look he was coming to recognize in patrons of the Lord and in whores and tradesmen, even in the jakes farmers and rag-and-bone men he dealt with.
    For Tom was a killer. People saw it in him and it disquieted them so that if they could they avoided him. If they could not do that, they would equip themselves with dourness, inclinetowards few words and eye him askance. And for his part Tom did little to assuage their unease, saw no point in trying to be anything other than what he was: a man who had butchered others in the red-hot madness of battle. A man who had lain with the dead, been pecked at by the carrion feeders, and yet had been turned away from Hell itself and brought back to life.
    The freezing night he had spent on the plain below Edgehill was a haunting from which he could not unshackle himself. In the daytime, when he was busy earning his food and beer, the memory of that great battle was a thin gossamer web clinging to his soul. But at night, after they had enjoyed each other and Ruth was sleeping soundly beside him, its horror spread like a dark heavy stain that threatened to spill into his mouth and drown him. Somehow the smell of death, of open bowels and the copper stink of blood, would seep from his memory back into his nose. Pain would bloom in the wound in his shoulder – all healed now – where scalding hot lead had ripped through his flesh. He would clench his right hand, the savage stub of the third finger throbbing, reminding him of the indignity of being mutilated by thieves who had flocked to loot the dead.
    And he would hear again brave Achilles’s scream of pain as the musket ball punched into his noble chest.
    And yet he kept it all, its foulness and its shame, its savagery and its … thrill to himself. He knew Ruth would gladly hear the whole if he would tell it. She would listen sympathetically and then she would minister to him in her fashion, show him kindness the way a young girl will tend to a lame dog or a bird with a broken wing. No, that was unfair. There would be more to it than that, more than some ingenuous need to mend him. Truth be told he knew the girl was more in love with him than he was with her. Her eyes had betrayed as much when they had coupled the night after his return and Ruth’s soul had, for one fleeting moment, lain as bare as her body. Yes Ruth would care for him, and even given the affections of such as her, a servinggirl who is every man’s friend, it would perhaps prove balm to his soul.
    But he said nothing, instead feeling the rank memory of that late October night suppurate and fester like a wound that is bandaged tight and given no air.
    Now, The Leaping Lord on Long Southwark, which Abiezer Grey leased off Mark Sayer for an annual rent of fifty pounds and a sugar loaf, was the nearest thing Tom had to a home, and each day he found himself doing the kinds of jobs that once, in a distant life, would be done by servants without