Waterfall Read Online Free Page A

come from. It’d freak you out. It’s freakin’ me out!”
    He leaned back, as if surprised by my anger and confused by my odd language. But then he turned, sensing the man stealthily approaching him from behind. I’d tried to distract him-had been moderately successful-but these men were trained soldiers. That was clear enough. He met the knight’s heavy strike, barely deflecting it from slicing his head like a melon.

    I had to get out of here.
    A hand clenched my forearm, and I let out a yelp, but then quickly swallowed it. It was the first knight in gold that I had seen. Even more handsome up close. But his eyes were no longer soft in wonder. They were hard, staring down at me in consternation. “Venga,” he said gruffly in Italian. Come.
    I looked across the field and saw the crimson knight, wounded, his arms draped around two of his men. He glared at me and the knight beside me, then shouted. The man, my attacker, immediately broke from the other golden knight and retreated to join his comrades. My protector’s knights let him pass, unhindered, other than sending him verbal taunts. The battle was over, for some reason. The others mounted their horses, all draped in scarlet, gave us long looks, and then rode away.
    I looked to the men who now surrounded me, staring at me. Suddenly I felt weak-kneed. I was now under the protection-or was I the prisoner?-of the dudes from the gold castle.
    “I hope you’re the good guys,” I muttered.

     

“Where are you taking me?” I cried in Italian, wrenching my elbow from the young man’s firm grasp as we walked away. “And why are you all dressed like someone out of a Shakespearean play?”
    The leader turned and eyed me, his handsome face a mass of confusion. “What is Shakespearean?”
    What is Shakespearean? Who doesn’t know Shakespeare?
    “I could ask the same of you,” he continued, hands on his hips. “Why are you out in such curious underclothes? Is this how the Normans send out their womenfolk?”
    Normans? I glanced over to the two young men behind their leader. They were all in their late teens, early twenties. They’d been in battle-not mock medieval battle, but real, hand-to-hand, I-wantto-kill-you battle. And the dialect of Italian… the same as that emerging from my own mouth… Dante. They-I-sounded like Dante’s Divine Comedy. My parents had made us read and recite portions of The Inferno last summer, in Italian. Apparently their efforts paid off, because I could now suddenly speak in Dante’s dialect, the first unified Italian the country had ever known, but a bit different from the modern version.

    I looked to my left, through a gap in the trees that allowed me to see out into the thickly wooded valley. My hand came slowly to my mouth as my eyes scanned the slant of the hills again and again, trying to make sense of it, make sure I knew where I was looking. Because there in the distance, edging out of the trees, were the refined, perfect stones of another massive fortress wall. The tip of a waving golden flag dangled above it, visible one moment, retreating the next. That castle-the one we’d passed every day en route to the site, the one that Lia and I had tramped through one day, bored out of our minds-it had been nothing but a pile of rubble. It looked as if it had just been built, just like the one we could see from the tumuli campus. Impossible. Impossible!
    I dragged my eyes to meet the young man’s. “You don’t know Shakespeare. Do you know Dante?”
    He laughed, a scoff that didn’t even move his handsome features. Such dark, piercing eyes, as if he could see through me. Laced with wide lashes. He had a man’s chin, even though he couldn’t be much older than me. His voice was low, rumbly, curiously warm despite his cold tone. “Who among the aristocracy has not heard of Dante? My father was privileged to host him in our home shortly before his death.”
    I tried to swallow but my mouth was dry. Dante had been dead for