The Bones of the Earth (The Dark Age) Read Online Free

already killed Mladen and Oresh!” Roslaw barked. “You go after them, they’ll kill you, too!”
    “ Not if we all stayed together!” said someone else. “Like Mladen said!”
    “ Who here even has a sword? Who’s willing to die today?” With one eye, Roslaw glared at each man, one by one. Each one looked down. “Exactly. There’s no point in all of us getting killed.”
     
    Hrech put his hands on his friend’s shoulders. “They’re gone, Javor. They might as well have died in a pestilence. And if you don’t stop this madness, you’ll just get yourself killed.”
    Javor blinked. He looked down the Avars’ trail, where it skirted a stand of poplars and beeches. Two boys armed with a knife and a wood-axe don’t stand a chance against heavily armed, trained and experienced warriors on horseback—who probably had friends they were meeting, he realized. I am going to be responsible for killing my only friend. “Hrech, go back home if you want to,” he said. “I’m going on.”
    Hrech sighed. “I can’t leave you out here, far from home, alone,” he said. He did not say No one else is likely to come looking for you. Not for Javor. Maybe they would search for someone else, anyone else, but Hrech was almost the only one in their village, other than Javor’s parents, who cared at all about the strange, tall blonde boy. Weird , they said. Strange. Touched. Nobody ever said stupid, no one except Mean Mrost, who delighted in making people feel bad. No, Javor was not stupid, Hrech thought. But he certainly had his own way of looking at things.
    “ So what’s your plan?” Hrech asked. Javor looked at him blankly again. “Do you have a plan?”
    Javor had to admit that he had none. He had set after the raiders in heat and anger, thinking only of Elli, the girl he loved, whom he last saw crying and afraid.
    He still could not understand it. He knew people could be cruel—he had suffered the cruelty of children often enough. But to kill men just to show how tough you were … to steal food from hungry people … to beat women so you could take their daughters  …
    He shook his head as he followed the trampled underbrush and broken branches of horses’ passing.
    He also could not believe what the other villagers, his people, his relatives had done: nothing. They buried Oresh and Mladen, they laid Grat’s mother down on a straw bed. They talked and argued and yelled and cried.
    But they just let the Avars take the girls away.
    He remembered how his father, Swat, had sat down beside Roslaw with a pitcher of ale. “I know we don’t have much. But if we gathered everything we have, food, ale, the few treasures any of us have, maybe we could negotiate with them, get the girls back.”
    Roslaw just shook his head.
    “ It’s too dangerous,” said Bogdan, a small nervous man with a continual tic in his left eye. “They would just take what we offered for the girls and kill everyone who came to talk!”
    “ We would need to arm ourselves,” Swat had tried to say reasonably. But other men gathered and the whole thing became a squabbling, useless argument.
    It was at that point that Javor had known what had to be done—what he had to do. He could almost see himself doing it. He went quietly to his hut, found the little wooden case his mother had shown him the day before and took out his great-grandfather’s long dagger. Even in the dim light of the hut, he could see the angles and spirals on the blade, the fish-shape of the handle. The blade’s curve was comforting, as if there were no other shape a blade could be. Like a big tooth. He wrapped it in a soft cloth and tucked it into his belt, then stepped out of the hut and toward the edge of the village.
    At that moment, he heard a sound like an owl’s call from the hut. Anyone else would have wondered about that: why is there an owl in my hut? Why is it calling during the day? But Javor was focused on something else.
    “ Where are you going?” said a