Greenwood, Ed - Band of Four 02 by Greenwood Ed

Author:Greenwood, Ed [Greenwood, Ed]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Published: 2012-05-30T15:31:29+00:00

Raulin sputtered with mirth, choked, and doubled over, nearly knock-ing his forehead on the table.

Embra raised her eyebrows, and then looked at Hawkril and said crisply, "Indeed."

Without waiting for his reply, she swung her legs around the side of her high-backed chair so she wouldn't have to go to the trouble of pushing it back from the table and stood up, reeling a little in her weariness. "Raulin," she said, "leave the rest of that, unless you'd like to spend the night down here."

"Lady," Hawkril told her, hoisting the healer in one hand and reaching for the still-coughing lad with the other, "that'd more properly be 'what's left of the night.' We're down to the last two barmen—even the tapmaster's gone—and it's but three candles to dawn."

"Wonderful. Woe betide the chamber-wench who tries to wake me in the morning," Embra yawned warningly.

Hawkril chuckled at a sudden vision of a sleepily furious Embra turning a cheerful, buxom chamber-wench into a toad, and led the way to the stair.

They'd taken rooms at the end of the overpassage, which would no doubt be cold, drafty, and dark, but quieter than the chambers nearer the stairs. The passage-door of one was locked and barred, but its connecting door to the other room was unlatched, so the way for any intruder to reach Embra was through the room where three men would be snoring—with Hawkril lying across the passage-door, sword to hand, and Sarasper sleep-ing right across Embra's door.

Embra looked around her little chamber in the gloom. She had her bed, her chamberpot, and icy wash-water for the morning. .. and that, right now, was all in Aglirta that mattered.

It was cold, and the bed doubtless had its share of tiny biting bugs. For a moment Embra considered just wrapping herself in her cloak and falling onto it and into welcome oblivion, but then she thought of spending days being bitten—and scratching, with Craer's leeringly enthusiastic offers of help ringing in her ears, if he reappeared from wherever he'd been snatched to, again—when she could bundle her clothes in that cloak and hang them as far from the bed as possible, and just scrub the bugs off in the morning. So she sighed and started tugging and unbuttoning.

Bare and shivering beside the bed as she shook her tangled and dirty hair out and ran her fingers through it as best she could—gods, that would end up full of bugs, too!—the Lady Silvertree was reluctant to step out of her boots; once her feet touched the threadbare rug, the chill would really strike home.

So it was that, straightening up from blowing out the bedside lamp, Embra was far more awake that she'd hoped to be, and still wearing her boots, when there came an almighty crash from the other side of the door. She whirled around. "Hawk? Sarasper? What's—?"

The sound was followed by a snarled curse that a man makes when he's both startled and doing something that tries his strength, and the unmistakable sound of a sword ringing as it was drawn.

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