Shadowfell Read Online Free

observed.
    ‘I’m not – I can’t –’ My teeth were chattering, and not only with cold.
    ‘Sit closer.’
    ‘I – I don’t –’ I stared down at my hands, unable to put into words what held me trembling and incoherent. The porridge was starting to cook; the smell made my mouth water.
    I heard his footsteps as he approached me; I shrank into myself. A moment later his cloak dropped down around my shoulders, heavy and warm, and the footsteps retreated. When I looked up, he was seated on the other side of the fire, facing me. I blinked. It was the first time I had seen him without the deep, concealing hood. What I had expected, I was not sure. Certainly not that he would be so young. He looked no more than five or six years my senior. It was not a handsome face. His nose had been broken at least once, and there was a puckered scar on his chin and another from a wound that must have come close to taking out his right eye. His scalp and chin wore matching dark stubble. A pair of deep-set grey eyes looked across at me, offering very little.
    I pulled the cloak around me, but its comforting weight and the warmth from the fire failed to keep out the chill in my bones. I cleared my throat, making myself speak. ‘Wh– what do you want from me?’ I managed, and saw something change in his face, as if, remarkably, it had not until now occurred to him why I was so scared.
    ‘You have nothing to fear from me,’ he said. ‘Neryn, is it?’
    ‘Mm.’ I drew a gasping breath. ‘So you – you – ?’
    ‘I have no designs on your person, believe me.’
    ‘There were other men there who wouldn’t have hesitated.’ A profound relief swept through me as I remembered the touch of that red-faced man’s hands. ‘I’m in your debt.’ If he had not accepted Father’s challenge, if he had not escorted me off the boat and out of the settlement, I would have been burned, drowned or taken by the Enforcers.
    ‘My existence holds sufficient complications without adding that particular one,’ my companion said evenly. I did not know if the complication he referred to was being owed a debt, or taking an untouched girl of fifteen summers to his bed. ‘Warm yourself, eat, sleep. With me, you’re safe.’
    ‘Then . . .’ I watched as he retrieved the pot and poured half the porridge into a metal pannikin. ‘Then why did you accept the wager? Why didn’t you leave us alone?’
    He brought the pannikin around the fire to me, offering a bone spoon. ‘Eat,’ he said. ‘It’s not much, but it’s hot.’
    Lumpy and undercooked as it was, the porridge tasted like food for the gods.
    ‘Take it slowly or you’ll burn your mouth,’ the man said. He was eating from the pot, using a piece of bark as a spoon. ‘How long since you last had a hot meal?’
    ‘I can’t remember.’
    ‘Been on the road awhile, then.’
    I did not answer. Questions were dangerous even when a person didn’t have secrets to hide. A person could be killed on the strength of giving the wrong answer or revealing a little too much information.
    ‘Do you have kin? A home, somewhere to go?’
    It was hard to believe I was safe here, though the food, the fire and the warm cloak were conspiring to lull me. The knowledge of loss, the sick, bleak thought that I was all alone in the world, lay inside me somewhere, alongside an image of my father burning, his mouth open in a silent scream of pain. The sight of the Enforcers in that settlement, doing their cruel work, had awoken dark memories of another time, another raid. But my body was a traitor; it soaked up the warmth and tugged me toward sleep. ‘No,’ I said. ‘If I had, I wouldn’t have been on the chancy-boat.’
    ‘Worldly goods? Did you leave them on the boat?’
    I motioned to the small bag I had carried over my shoulder. ‘That’s all I have.’
    He used his fingers to wipe the last of the porridge from the pot. My share was already finished. ‘You asked me before why I took the wager.