Shadow of the Lords Read Online Free

footprints? ‘Do you think I’m likely to be let near the marketplace today? It’s a fairy tale, Lion. Nobody ever really escapes that way – not unless he’s more trouble than he’s worth and his master lets him go just to spare himself the expense of feeding him.’
    â€˜Buy your freedom.’
    I laughed out loud. Startled faces turned towards me, and even the piercing cries of the girls still squabbling behind us dried up, as if they had realized that their audience’s attention had wandered.
    â€˜Buy my freedom?’ I hissed, abruptly feeling the need to be a little bit discreet. ‘You must be joking! With what?’
    Lion looked ruefully down at the tattered remains of his cloak. ‘I’m still the Guardian of the Waterfront, even if I don’t look like it! What did old Black Feathers pay you for your liberty – twenty cloaks? I can double that. I can offer more if it isn’t enough.’
    â€˜And how would I pay you back?’
    His answer caught me unawares. He said nothing. Instead, he lunged at me with both arms outstretched and his palms, held out flat in front of him, slammed into my chest with all of a hefty, muscular warrior’s substantial weight behind them.
    I was a pace or two from the edge of the causeway, with my back to the water. With a shout of alarm, I staggered back under the force of the blow until there was nothing under my heels but empty space. For a moment my arms whirled frantically as I tried to keep my balance, and then I fell, breaking the surface with so much force that the breath burst from my lungs as a glistening cloud of bubbles.
    By the time my head was in the air again, with water streaming from my mouth and nose, I had got the joke. I gathered he had explained it to the bystanders, judging by the laughter that greeted my reappearance.

    â€˜Happy birthday!’ he cried.
    â€˜Very funny,’ I gasped, as my fingers sought a purchase among the rough stones lining the causeway’s side. ‘It would be funnier still if you’d help me up!’
    â€˜Going Through the Water’, we called it: the traditional ducking your friends and family would give you on your name-day. ‘I suppose I’m supposed to provide you with a feast,’ I muttered, as I scrambled back on to the road. ‘Sorry, Lion, but you’re out of luck there!’
    â€˜All right,’ he replied mildly, ‘I’ll let you off. But as for paying me back – I’m offering you the chance to buy your freedom as a present, you idiot!’
    For a moment I felt light headed with relief.
    I had a day ahead of me when I could pretend to be my own man; but that was only because I belonged to Tezcatlipoca, and on his day, that one day in every two hundred and sixty, nobody dared lay a finger on a slave. Tomorrow, I would be returned to my duties, and the first of them would be to hunt down my own son.
    Yet my brother was saying that this need not happen. I could be free every day of my life. I could be free of old Black Feathers’s arbitrary and often murderous will, with a new beginning that somehow cancelled all the shame and misery I had known since the day I left the Priest House. The prospect was like the best sacred wine I had ever tasted: it made me feel almost giddy but still sharp, and even as I was about to embrace it – as I was about to embrace my brother, for the first time since we were children – I saw the fatal flaw in the scheme.
    â€˜Forget it,’ I said brusquely, forging ahead into the crowd.
    â€˜Forget it?’ For a moment Lion could only stand still, echoing my words incredulously. Then he dashed after me, rudely shouldering aside a couple of men who had strayed into his
path. ‘What do you mean, forget it? Are you mad? Don’t be so stubborn, Yaotl. Listen to me!’
    I kept looking for gaps between the broad backs blocking the way ahead – anything rather than