Returner's Wealth by Paul Stewart & Chris Riddell

Author:Paul Stewart & Chris Riddell
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Juvenile Fiction, Action & Adventure, General, Fantasy & Magic, Animals, Dragons; Unicorns & Mythical, Science Fiction
ISBN: 9781480415157
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 2013-09-03T22:05:04.538000+00:00

Thirty-Three

The girl’s head swam and her body felt bruised and sore, and when she tried to move, a blade of pain stabbed at her shoulder. She winced, and froze, and waited for the sharp pain to subside.

Her nostrils flared as she sniffed at the air. It smelled spicy and dustdry. Peatmoss, she identified, and valley bracken, and her fingertips confirmed that she was lying on a soft mattress of their dried filaments and fronds. She detected another smell besides, sweet yet acrid, that she recognized as the odour of burning wood. Spit-hickory. And when she listened she heard the hissing crackle of a fire; that, and the creak and rustle of someone moving somewhere close by, trying to be quiet. The creeping footfalls sounded heavy and the breathing was low. This was a man – a young man, she judged, by the sound he made when he cleared his throat.

Where was she?

Tentatively the girl parted her eyelids till there was a thin crack between them. She saw walls – thick oppressive walls, constructed from large slabs of rock that had been painstakingly placed together, one on top of the other, and appeared mortared by the darkness of night that seeped between them.

She knew she must be inside one of the craghuts that she had seen many times, but never ventured into.

It was windowless. There was a closed door to her left that offered no way out, and a hole at the centre of the low flat ceiling above that might. Brownstain smoke was twisting up through it. There was a sturdy table, with a bench on either side. By the side wall was some kind of dip in the floor, shallow and curved, and she was lying in it.

And there was the man.

He was crouching down in near darkness at the far side of the room, turned half away and hunched over. Something was glugging. Flameglow flickered on his back, and on the side of his face. She smelled the leafcrush odour of fresh sweat, then caught a whiff of oil.

Wyrmeoil.

The man was filling a lantern, his breath coming in short jerks as he poured the wyrmeoil carefully from a large earthenware pot and into the small copper reserve. When he splashed some, he chided himself. The girl saw his jaw flex and his Adam’s apple move as he swallowed.

She eased herself round, screwing up her face as the blade of pain twisted at her shoulder once again. She leaned up on one elbow.

A pang of separation, acute and charged with longing, juddered through her body as she thought of Aseel. She wanted to be with him, not holed up in this craghut. He was out there somewhere, and if he had returned to the speckled stack already, then he would be looking for her …

Where was the craghut? And who was this man?

Was he kith? He sure looked like kith, with his heavy jacket and thick breeches, and the calflength boots of tanned skin. Wyrmeskin. And he smelled like

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