Before Winter. Nancy Wallace K.

Чтение книги онлайн.

       CHAPTER 5

       The Wilderness of Llisé

      Devin wakened to the sound of sobbing. He rubbed blurry eyes with one hand to see Lavender scouring the ledge above them, her muddy hands feverishly patting the rock. Some of the wooden heads cradled in the remnants of her skirt had fallen to lie in the dirt at her feet. Devin prevented two of them from falling with the toe of his boot as they rolled precariously close to the edge of the ravine.

      “He’s gone! He’s gone!” Lavender sobbed. “We can’t go on without him to protect us!”

      “The Captain of the Guard?” Devin asked resignedly.

      Lavender turned to fix him with a suspicious eye. “How did you know?”

      Devin sat up. “I didn’t actually know for sure. But I dreamed about him last night. He kept shouting, ‘Danger! Danger!’ and then he rolled off the ledge and down the ravine. I watched him float down the stream toward Calais.”

      Lavender rose to her diminutive size, her hands on her hips. “You didn’t even try to stop him? To save him?”

      “I was asleep!” Devin protested. “I saw this in a dream. Have you asked Marcus if he heard anything?”

      Marcus shook his head. “I certainly didn’t hear him roll down into the stream, Lavender.” He gestured at the wooden heads scattered around her feet. “Are you certain he isn’t there?”

      She flopped onto the dirt, sorting balls into groups around her, murmuring each name lovingly to herself. Devin watched her, wondering how much of reality she had any true hold on. She looked so pathetic, tears drying in dirty streaks down her cheeks, her fingers shaking as she tallied up the only remnants of her family and friends that she had left.

      “What have we done to our people,” Devin whispered to Marcus, “that they have been left so fragile and pitiful? Angelique’s story shocked me when I realized how much she had to bear and then there was Elsbeth, Dariel Moreau’s wife. She went to the market and came home to find her husband tortured and murdered on the floor of Tirolien’s Bardic Hall. Who knows what unhinged Lavender’s mind or how many more there are like her? How many children have watched their parents die and have been left orphaned to …”

      “Just stop!” Marcus demanded. “Why are you so maudlin this morning? It won’t help anything to dwell on this. You’ll end up spouting gibberish yourself, if you haven’t already.”

      “He’s not here,” Lavender wailed suddenly. She glared at Devin. “I can’t believe you wouldn’t help him! He would still be here if you had caught him when he fell.”

      Devin sighed in exasperation. “Well obviously, I didn’t. I wasn’t even awake, Lavender. I thought I dreamt the entire thing.”

      “He took the time to warn you!” she pointed out with an accusing finger. “And it cost him his life.”

      Devin resisted the urge to point out that a wooden ball was not alive. “He may have warned me,” he said quietly. “But he didn’t tell me what he was warning me about.”

      “We can’t stay here,” Lavender stated, gathering the wooden heads in her tattered skirt. “We need to move on, now. Surely you can understand that!”

      “Perhaps he was warning us about the deserted town down the mossy steps,” Devin said. “There is more than one place here where we may encounter danger.”

      “Well, I’m leaving,” Lavender said with a huff. “I don’t need to be told twice that my life is in danger. If the Captain of the Guard gave his life to save me, I would be foolish to disregard his advice and so would you!”

      Marcus dropped his head in his hands. “God! This is insane!”

      “Call it what you will,” Lavender replied sulkily. “But remember that I warned you.”

      Marcus clapped a hand on Devin’s shoulder. “Let’s go! There’s no use arguing with her and call me a bleeding-heart moron, but I won’t let her go on alone.”

      Devin smiled and stood up, one hand on the rocks behind him, hoping to hide his persistent dizziness from Marcus. His bodyguard didn’t need another thing to worry about.

      They slithered down the slope to the stream bed. Marcus persuaded Lavender to let him carry the wooden heads in the food sack after two escaped her skirt on the way down the incline. The smell of earth and pine reminded Devin sharply of his bodyguard’s gun pointing at him in another part of Tirolien but he pushed the memory away and concentrated instead on Marcus’ broad back ahead of him. Lavender led them deeper into the woods, where the ferns grew so large they towered over her. They followed the stream as it meandered to the northeast. The air was chilly this morning and wood smoke wafted through the trees.

      Marcus СКАЧАТЬ