Valley of Silence Read Online Free

beyond the castle walls.”
    â€œI know it. All who wish to witness this rite may attend. You can’t, I know. I’m sorry for it. It feels wrong. I feel the six of us, our circle, should be together at such a time.”
    Her hand reached up for her cross again. “Geall isn’t yours, I know that as well, but the moment of this, it’s important for what comes after. More than I knew before. More than I could have known.”
    She took a shaky breath. “They killed my father.”
    â€œWhat are you saying?”
    â€œI have to walk again. I can’t sit.” She got up quickly, rubbing her arms to warm them from the sudden chill in the air, and in her blood. She moved through the courtyard into one of the gardens.
    â€œI haven’t told anyone—I didn’t mean to tell you. What purpose does it serve? And I’ve no proof, just a knowing.”
    â€œWhat do you know?”
    Easier than she’d believed it would be to talk to him, to tell him, she realized, because he was also so to the point. “One of the two that killed my mother, that you brought here. The one I fought.” She held a hand up, and he watched her draw in her composure again. “Before I killed it, he said something of my father, and how he died.”
    â€œLikely trying to get a rise out of you, break your concentration.”
    â€œIt did that well enough, but was more, you see. I know it, inside me.” Looking at him, she pressed a hand to her heart. “I knew it when I looked at the one I killed. Not just my mother, but my father as well. I think Lilith sent them here this time because she’d had success with it before. When I was a child.”
    She continued to walk, her head bowed with the weight of her thoughts, her circlet glinting in the light of the torches. “They thought it was a bear gone mad. He was in the mountains, hunting. He was killed, he and my mother’s young brother. My uncle Riddock didn’t go as my aunt was close to her time with child. I…”
    She broke off again as footsteps echoed, keeping her silence until the sound of them drifted away. “They thought, those who found them and brought them home, they thought it was animals. And so it was,” she continued with steel in her tone now. “But these walk like a man. She sent them to kill him, so there would be no child but me.”
    She turned to him then, the torchlight washing red over her pale face. “Perhaps, at that time, she knew only the ruler of Geall would be one of the circle. Or perhaps it was easier to kill him than me at that time, as I was hardly more than a baby and kept close watch on. Plenty of time for her to send assassins back for me. But instead they killed my mother.”
    â€œThose that did are dead.”
    â€œIs that comfort?” she wondered, and thought—from him—it likely was an offer of it. “I don’t know what to feel. But I know she took my parents from me. She took them to stop what can’t be stopped. We’ll meet her on the battlefield come Samhain, because it’s meant. Whether I fight as queen or not, I fight. She killed them for nothing.”
    â€œAnd nothing you could have done would have stopped it.”
    Yes, comfort, she thought again. Oddly, his pithy statement gave her just that. “I pray that’s true. But I know because of what was done, what was not done, what had to be, what comes tomorrow is more important than rite and ritual. Whoever holds that sword tomorrow leads this war, and wields it with the blood of my murdered parents. She couldn’t stop it. She cannot stop it.”
    She stepped back, gestured up. “Do you see the flags? The dragon and the claddaugh. The symbols of Geall since its beginning. Before this is done, I will ask that one more be hoisted.”
    He thought of all she might choose—a sword, a stake, an arrow. Then he knew. Not a weapon, not an instrument