Dark Moon of Avalon by Anna Elliott

Author:Anna Elliott
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Touchstone
Published: 2010-08-31T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter Eleven

ISOLDE FELT A TOUCH ON her arm and turned her head to find Hereric watching her with a worried frown. His remaining hand moved in a rapid series of signs.

Isolde not eat?

Isolde nodded. “Yes, I’ll eat. Thank you, Hereric.”

She took a mouthful of the round of bread one of Fidach’s men had given her and Hereric to share. It was slightly burned on one side and was flecked with bits of gravel from the grinding stone that she kept having to pick out with her fingers before she took a bite. Isolde chewed, swallowed, and told herself grimly and for the dozenth time since they’d left the abandoned villa that questioning whether she’d chosen right was like asking whether a man would rather be run through with a sword or a knife.

She could, she supposed, have refused to accompany Fidach and his band. But she and Hereric couldn’t have risked staying much longer where they were. And—so far, at least—they were safer with a group of armed men about them than they would have been on their own. Isolde took another bite of bread and glanced at Hereric, sitting beside her on the ground and leaning back against a fallen log.

Above the flaxen beard, his face was still pale, his eyes sunken by illness. But there was no flush of color on his cheeks or any unnatural brightness in his eyes that would mean the fever had returned, and so far as Isolde could tell, the day’s journey didn’t seem to have done him any other harm. He was still too weak to walk, so two of Fidach’s men had been carrying him between them in a sling fashioned from a pair of sturdy branches and a blanket of stitched-together goat hides.

They had traveled through dense forest, following no track that Isolde could see and had met with no one at all on the way. Still, the signs of the raids and warfare that had ravaged this region were plain. Occasionally Isolde had seen a patch of blackened ground that marked a burned settlement, and once they’d crossed an open field where a long-ago battle must once have been waged. The dead had been buried shallow in one mass grave, and the soil over them had started to erode away, so that here and there among the grass a white bone jutted out of the ground: a tapered thigh bone or a smooth, rounded skull.

The men of the outlaw band murmured uneasily among themselves as they passed the old battlefield, and Isolde saw several make signs against evil or mutter charms meant to keep ghosts at rest. They passed the burned settlements, though, without a second glance. Isolde wondered whether that made it less likely that they had done the burning themselves or more. She might know next to nothing, yet, about Fidach or his men. But lands torn by constant fighting and war drew bands like this one. Bands of the outlaw, the mad, and the discontented who preyed on the lawless countryside like ravens on carrion.

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