The Grey King Read Online Free Page B

rising, a lone peak, lower than the mountains around it yet dominating all the surrounding land. A few large black birds circled its top; as he watched, they merged together into a shape of a long V, as geese do, and flew unhurriedly away over the mountain in the direction of the sea.
    Then from somewhere close, he heard one short sharp bark from a dog.
    Will jumped. No dog was likely to be on the mountain alone. Yet there was no sign of another human being anywhere. If someone was nearby, why was he hiding himself?
    He turned to go on up the slope, and only then did he see the dog. He stood stone-still. It was poised directly above him, alert, waiting: a white dog, white all over with only one small black patch on its back, like a saddle. Except for the curious pattern of colouring, it looked like a traditional Welsh sheepdog, muscular and sharp-muzzled, with feathered legs and tail: a smaller version of the collie. Will held out his hand. “Here, boy,” he said. But the dog bared its teeth, and gave a low, threatening growl deep in its throat.
    Will took a few tentative steps up the slope, diagonally, in the direction he had been going before. Crouching on its stomach, the dog moved with him, teeth glittering, tongue lolling. The attitude was odd and yet familiar, and suddenly Will realised that he had seen it the evening before in the two dogs on his uncle’s farm that had been helping Rhys bring in the cows to be milked. It was the movement of control—the watchful crouch from which a working sheepdog would spring, to bring to order the animals it was driving in a particular direction.
    But where was this dog trying to drive him?
    Clearly, there was only one way to find out. Taking a deep breath, Will turned to face the dog and began deliberately clambering straight up the slope. The dog stopped, and the long, low growl began again in its throat; it crouched, back curved as if all four feet were planted like trees in the ground. The snarl of the white teeth said, very plainly: Not this way. But Will, clenching his fists, kept climbing. He shifted direction very slightly so that he would pass close to the dog without touching it. But then unexpectedly, with one short bark, the dog darted towards him, crouching low, and involuntarily Will jumped—and lost his balance. He fell sideways on the steep hillside. Desperately reaching his arms wide to stop himself from rolling headlong down, he slithered and bumped upside-down for a few wild yards, terrorloud as a shout in his head, until his fall was checked by something jerking fiercely at his sleeve. He came up against a rock, with a numbing thud.
    He opened his eyes. The line where mountain met sky was spinning before him. Very close was the dog, its teeth clamped on the sleeve of his jacket, tugging him back, all warm breath and black nose and staring eyes. And at the sight of the eyes, Will’s world spun round and over again so fast he thought he must still be falling. The roaring was in his ears again, and all things normal became suddenly chaos. For this dog’s eyes were like no eyes he had ever seen; where they should have been brown, they were silver-white: eyes the colour of blindness, set in the head of an animal that could see. And as the silver eyes gazed into his, and the dog’s breath panted out hot on his face, in a whirling instant Will remembered everything that his illness had taken away from him. He remembered the verses that had been put into his head as guide for the bleak, lone quest he was destined now to follow; remembered who he was and what he was—and recognised the design that under the mask of coincidence had brought him here to Wales.
    At the same time another kind of innocence fell away, and he was aware too of immense danger, like a great shadow across the world, waiting for him all through this unfamiliar land of green valleys and dark-misted mountain peaks. He was like a battle leader suddenly given news: