(eng) Patty Jansen - For Queen and Country 03 by The Idiot King

Author:The Idiot King [King, The Idiot]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

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Chapter 11

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IT WAS NOT until Johanna was in the market square that the fog lifted from her mind and she could think clearly and tease out the things that Magda had told her. Most of it was more or less what Loesie had said: something disturbed magic lines and no one is powerful enough to fix it. But someone had done this while digging. And there was a strange ship in the harbour in Saardam, possibly belonging to Alexandre.

That was more information than she’d had before, but it was still very incomplete.

The sky was darker than it had been when she came in, but right now, only a steady drizzle fell from the solid layer of clouds, whipped up by squalls of wind that chased the low-hanging clouds over the jumble of slate-covered roofs.

The heavy clouds promised more rain, and she had better hurry up if she wanted to stay dry.

She was about halfway along the riverbank when the clouds started disgorging their contents. Big fat drops fell. Johanna ran close to whatever little shelter the meagre bushes along the path offered, but quite a few drops still fell on her scarf. Wet spots were starting to seep through.

Then the rain struck in all earnest. The wind whipped up. So much water fell down from the sky that it was hard to see. Within a few paces she was soaked through.

On this part of the path from the outskirts of town to the camp there was no shelter at all. Sheets of rain lashed the trees.

Shards of mist rose from the river and drifted over the field. They moved.

Johanna stopped. She stood staring at the river, with the rain pelting down and water dripping from her hair. The water churned like it was boiling.

Johanna retreated.

Out of the mist rose an animal: a white-winged swan that glided over the water.

Then another one.

Both birds looked real and yet they did not. Their feathers were too bright, their beaks too orange.

Swans built their nests in the reed beds on the riverbank and she would have noticed their nest when coming this way. Swans were usually very defensive of those nests. There would have been cygnets, by now adult-sized but still with their grey feathers, aggressively defended by both parents. She knew a boy who got bitten by a swan so badly that his pants needed mending.

As she watched, both birds took to the air with a grace she had never seen from birds this large. She had only ever seen swans run over the water before they flew. It usually happened with much splashing and flapping of wings.

There were no ripples on the water. Already, both birds had vanished from sight.

But now something else appeared out of the mist: a figure of a woman, dressed in a light-coloured cloak with a hood covering her head. She was floating towards the shore, appearing to walk over the water.

Before she reached the riverbank, the ghostly figure veered to the left and floated in the direction of the camp.

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