Hawk of May by Gillian Bradshaw

Author:Gillian Bradshaw
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Sourcebooks Landmark
Published: 2010-08-31T22:00:00+00:00

Nine

When I woke the next morning the feeling of peace remained. Sion, however, seemed anxious. He picked at the bread that the monks had provided and brooded. The other farmers discussed land and crops and the weather, laying plans, but Sion did not join them. Half-way through the meal he stopped eating, a piece of bread raised in one hand, and looked at me evenly. “I had a strange dream last night,” he announced.

“Oh?” I asked, amused. “What was it?”

Sion looked back at his bread, shoved it into his mouth and chewed moodily before replying, “A dark thing came into the chapel porch.”

My amusement vanished and I stared at him. He went on without looking at me, or at anyone else, though the others were now listening with some interest. “I felt it come in through the door and stand there a moment. At first it looked like a shadow, and then I blinked and saw that it was…well, a little like a man. Like a corpse, blackened and half-rotted. It started to come forward, shambling a little, like a trained bear, and I tried to wake up, because I was in a cold sweat at the sight of the thrice-damned thing, but I could not wake.”

“Ah,” said one of the farmers. “I knew a man who had a dream like that, and when he woke up in the morning he found that his daughter had died. They are strange things, dreams.”

“They are indeed,” said Sion, “but that was not the end of it.” He began addressing me again, refusing to be sidetracked. “You did wake up. You stood and drew your sword, and the sword lit up like a pine torch catching light. You held it between yourself and the thing of perdition, looking like you’d just been given your heart’s desire, and then the two of you began fighting.” Sion shrugged uneasily, eyed Caledvwlch, and continued. “And then it was as though you were frozen, just beginning the fight, and I looked up at the wall behind the black thing, and there was a woman standing there.”

I found that my hand was somehow about the hilt of my sword.

“A dark woman, she was, with a white, starved face and terrible eyes, more beautiful than any woman I ever saw, but with something sick about her. I’ve seen such a look as that in a town beggar starving in a gutter and cursing the by-passers, but never in some proud beauty like that woman. She saw you about to fight the spirit of Yffern, and reached out to touch it; as she did, the darkness tripled. But then she looked up, and grew angry, and I looked behind me and saw there was a man there, a yellow-haired man cloaked in light, and he raised his hand, forbidding the woman to interfere.”

I sat and stared at Sion. I started to speak, could think of nothing to say. I had considered this man a simple farmer. A farmer he was, but not simple.

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