Shadowfell Read Online Free Page B

this spot’s well off the known tracks. Tomorrow I have to attend to some other business, but I can be back before dark. It happens that I’m going north too. Travel with me until our paths part ways and you’ll have protection on the road.’ He sounded diffident.
    He had been kind tonight, in his brusque fashion. But everything in me rejected this suggestion. ‘I don’t know you,’ I said. ‘I’d be a fool to trust you.’
    ‘You’d be still more of a fool,’ Flint said, ‘to go on alone. I said before, I want nothing from you. This is a simple offer of help. You need help.’
    ‘Thank you, but I’ll do well enough on my own.’
    My lids were drooping. The fire flickered strangely and beyond the circle of light I saw figures darting in and out of the shadows, slender winged beings with hair like streams of light. I heard their voices: Neryn! Oh, Neryn !
    ‘What?’ Flint turned his head, following my gaze.
    ‘Nothing.’ My heart was suddenly hammering. Let him not be able to see them, let him not realise what I had been looking at. I must divert his attention. ‘You said you were giving me a choice. Is that the choice, stay here or go on?’
    ‘The way things turned out down there, the choice was between life and death,’ Flint said levelly. ‘But yes, you have another choice now. I hope you’ll leave your decision until morning, and make it after some consideration. All I’m asking is that you wait for me here one more day. Stay safe, lie low until I can come on with you. After what’s just happened, it makes perfect sense for you to take a day to rest. You’re exhausted. Not thinking straight. Lie down, sleep. I’ll keep watch. Tomorrow you’ll see this differently.’
    ‘But –’
    ‘Rest,’ Flint said. ‘You’re safe here.’
    Keep away from me , I willed the uncanny presences. Don’t let him see you . I dared not glance back to the place where I had spotted them. I wished, not for the first time, that I was an ordinary girl with no canny gifts at all.
    I lay down with Flint’s big cloak wrapped around me and my shawl rolled up as a pillow. In my mind, I saw myself at four or five, in the garden of Grandmother’s cottage, sitting quiet by the berry bushes as two of the Good Folk filled a tiny basket woven from blades of grass. The basket took four berries, no more; but they were small folk and this would be a feast.
    ‘A blessing on your hearthstone, wise woman,’ said the little man, doffing his cap.
    ‘And a long life to your wee bairnie there,’ said the little woman, looking at me and bobbing a curtsy.
    Grandmother only nodded, and I was too enthralled to utter a word.
    The two of them walked away under the bushes and vanished between a pair of white stones, as if they had stepped into another realm. Which was precisely what they had done, Grandmother explained. That was the day she told me about sharing, about kindness, about secrecy. It was the day I began setting out bowls of milk and crusts of bread, and hoping I would encounter the Good Folk again soon. I had not yet learned that other people could not see them as easily as I did. Nor did I know, innocent as I was, that under the king’s law, speaking to uncanny folk was punishable by death.
    I would remember all my loved ones tonight. It seemed especially important to do this, to keep them in my heart, now that Father, too, was gone. Mother had left us long ago. My memory of her was always the same: the two of us on a pebbly beach, I making a creature from weed, sand and shells; she sitting by me, gazing out to sea, dreaming her dreams. Her hair was lifted around her head by the breeze, a soft nimbus of honey brown. I remembered how happy I had been that day. I had thought the sun would shine on us forever.
    My brother, Farral. One year my senior, and cut down fighting to protect his own. I remembered a time when, at the age of three or four, I had come upon a little bird that had perished in the sharp cold of winter. As