The Scroll Thief by R.F. Long

Author:R.F. Long
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Samhain Publishing, Ltd.
Published: 2009-02-24T00:00:00+00:00

Once he had persuaded the exhausted, emotional Halia to bathe and settled her to sleep, Malachy returned to Cerys’s side in the infirmary to offer what help he could. She didn’t ask for it, but there was nowhere else he wanted to be. He needed to help her, as much as she needed to help the nomads. No one else died.

Cerys toiled through the night. She constantly cursed whoever had fed her the drugged water. Sometimes those curses remained under her breath, only audible to Malachy, but not always. Sometimes, she shouted them. Her way of dealing with it, perhaps? He didn’t know, nor did he care so long as he was sure she was all right. He stayed with her until dawn, until he became aware that his supporting arms were the only things holding her upright.

“Enough,” he told her. “You’re no good to them like this. Not if you’re honest.” To his surprise, she nodded and tried to give him a smile. But she moved as if her whole body was hollow with tiredness and pain.

She kissed his cheek when he helped her back to the tent, her lips so soft against his skin. At another time he would have turned into her kiss, welcomed it and revelled in the closeness, but his body ached and his mind needed rest. He caught a few brief hours of dreamless sleep.

To be honest, he couldn’t wait to be travelling. The nomads threw themselves into the work of dismantling their half-made camp and preparing litters for the wounded and the dead. He watched them as he filled waterskins in the pool and tried to ignore the bloodstains left behind in the sand.

Malachy only had this one task. Most of the work had been done when Trask woke him. With their water collected for the final leg of their trip to Selima, they moved on. The atmosphere had been irrevocably changed, as if they travelled with a different group of people. Orienne and Eldorin were nowhere to be seen. Trask spoke to no one and Malachy dozed in the saddle. Cerys hummed to herself again, a gentle hypnotic tune, her eyes closed, her hands only loosely holding the reigns. Better not to mention it to Trask, he decided. He’d only think she was working magic. Perhaps she was.

They camped at sunset and the nomads set about building the funeral pyres of their family members, far away from the place where they had burned the bodies of the merkands. Halia almost dropped off the saddle and Malachy helped her to the tent she shared with Cerys. The healer examined her briefly.

“She’s still suffering from a degree of shock,” she told him. “Just stay with her a while. Tonight will be hard on everyone.”

“Tonight?”

“The funerals. Altarain’s funeral.”

When he entered the tent, Halia lay on her side, curled up in a blanket. He held her close while she cried.

“What’s wrong, Hally?”

“It’s all my fault, Mal. Everything. All this death, it’s my fault. I should never have taken the job.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.