Norton, Andre - Witch World - Estcarp Cycle 02 by Norton Andre

Author:Norton, Andre [Norton, Andre]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2012-08-15T01:41:00+00:00

Web of the Witch World

A Witch World Novel by

Andre Norton

Version 1.1

Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html

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1 GAUNTLET THROWN

IN THE NIGHT there had been a storm with great gusts of angry wind to batter ancient walls, aim spearthrusts of rain at the window slits of the chamber. But its violence had been reduced to a sullen mutter outside the South Keep. And Simon Tregarth had found that mutter soothing.

No, this was no troubling of nature—the raw nature man must fight and subdue for his own survival. It was a very different unease he felt as he lay in the early morning, awake and aware as a sentinel listening to sounds beyond his post.

Chill sweat gathered in his armpits, beaded dankly on his slightly hollowed cheeks and square jaw. Gray light overtook the room shadows, there was no sound, but—

His hand went out tentatively before he consciously thought. Nor did he entirely realize that he was yielding to an emotion which he still found new and hard to understand. This was an instinctive appeal for comradeship and support against—what? He could set no name to the uneasiness which held him.

Fingers met warm flesh, cupped on soft skin. He turned his head on the pillow. The lamp was unlit, but there was wan light enough to see his bedfellow. Open, watchful eyes met his fearlessly, but their depths were shadowed by a twin to the anxiety growing in Simon.

Then she moved. Jaelithe, she who had been a witch of Estcarp, and was now his wife, sat up abruptly, the black silk of her hair pulling from beneath his cheek to cloak her shoulders, her hands folded over her small high breasts. She no longer gazed at him, but searched the room, open to their sight since the midsummer mildness had led to the bed hangings being looped up for the free passage of night breezes.

The strangeness of that chamber came and went for Simon. Sometimes the present was a dream, ill-rooted and illusory, when he thought of the past. At other times it was the past which had no part of him at all. What was he? Simon Tregarth—disgraced ex-army officer, a criminal who had fled the vengeance of wolves beyond the law, who had taken the final step of the perfect escape known to that evil world—the “gate.” Jorge Petronius had opened it for him—an age-old stone seat rumored to take any man daring enough to sit in it to a new world, one where his talents would make him at home. That was one Simon Tregarth.

Another lay here and now in the South Keep of Estcarp, March Warder of the south, sworn to the service of the Women of Power; he had taken to wife one of the feared witches of the age-sombered land of Estcarp. And this was one of the times when the present annulled the past—when he crossed a border he could not describe into a firmer union with the world he had so abruptly entered.

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