Knight's Shadow Read Online Free Page A

seeping from the wound staining red hair to a deeper crimson.
    Red hair
.
    Thank the Saints. This girl had curly red hair, not the straight, mostly brown tresses that Aline had inherited from her father. The rapture of unexpected relief soon turned to a grinding, sickening guilt. This girl whom I had so easily consigned to irrelevance had done nothing – less than nothing – to deserve this end, this way, alone. When the blade had come for her, had she cried out for her mother, or her father?
    A choking scream reached my ears and I turned to see a figure running towards me, the nightmist clinging to his outstretched arms. It was one of the village men – Bannis? Baris? All I could remember was that he grew barley in a small field and made beer with it. The locals liked it.
    ‘Celeste!’ he screamed, ignoring my swords and pushing me out of the way. He fell to his knees and cradled the girl in his arms. ‘I told her to stay in the mountains!’ he cried. ‘I
told
her . . . I went back but she was gone – she must’ve followed me. You—! This is because of you and your damned Greatcoats . . . you damned . . . damned . . .
Trattari
!’ He sobbed as he yelled at me then, accusing me of terrible crimes, saying the things a man says when his child is dead and he needs someone to blame. I wanted to shout right back at him: to scream at him that if he and his thrice-damned mates hadn’t betrayed us, his child would have had a chance, but I couldn’t bring myself to do so because he was right, in a way: had we not been here, he wouldn’t have had to betray us, and maybe then none of this would have happened.
    On the other hand, this is Tristia.
    I clenched my hands tightly around the grips of my rapiers. Grief passes faster than it should when there are still enemies in the field, and rage provides its own kind of clarity. I would find Trin and make her pay for this: not just for the men, women and children dying in villages and towns across the Duchy of Pulnam as she kept up pressure on Duke Erris to swear his support for her, but for the murder of Lord Tremondi, and most of all for what she was trying to do to Aline.
    The sounds of steel-on-steel broke through the mist and guilt gave way to fear.
Move
, I told myself.
Don’t sit here wallowing. Aline is out there, alone, waiting for you to find her
. I ran towards the noises in the mist.
I will find her
, I promised myself. Aline’s a smart girl and she can be brave when she needs to be – hadn’t we survived together for nearly the entire Blood Week in Rijou before we’d been caught? She was hiding now, I was sure of it. She’d’ve found a place to wait for me, and now I would find her before Trin’s men did and I would pick her up and get to my horse and take her fast and far from this place. The daughter of my King wouldn’t die because of me.
    *
    I found Brasti some fifty yards away, near one of the village’s two wells, nursing his hand while sitting on the corpse of his opponent’s body, which was lying face down in the mud.
    ‘The son of a bitch got me,’ he said, showing me a wound barely deeper than a shaving cut.
    ‘You’ll live,’ I said. ‘Get up.’
    ‘It’s my hand, Falcio,’ Brasti complained, rising to his feet. ‘I’m an archer, not a swordsman. My art requires finesse and skill; it’s not just swinging a pointy bar of metal around like a doddering old man waving a stick.’
    ‘Remind me to kiss it better for you later,’ I said, hauling him up by the shoulder.
    We took off at a run and headed into the mist, ignoring the bodies of villagers, Greatcoats and Trin’s warriors littering the ground. There was still no sign of Aline, so I gave a short prayer to Saint Birgid-who-weeps-rivers that one of ours had found her.
    ‘Where’s Kest?’ I asked suddenly.
    ‘I’m not sure. He took off after some spectacularly big armoured bastard who’d just made short work of two of the Tailor’s Greatcoats. I told him we needed to stick