A Harvest of Ash and Blood by D. J. Molles EPUB & PDF – eBook Details Online
- Status: Available for Free Download
- Author:y D. J. Molles
- Language: English
- Genre: Military Fantasy
- Format: PDF / EPUB
- Size: 5 MB
- Price: Free
Hard to measure where a man’s life takes a swerve from the common to the
uncommon. For Lochled Thatcher, it may well have been the moment that
he stared the girl right in the eye and wondered when they were going to
burn her alive.
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He stood as though struck dumb, right there in the middle of the shitstinking streets of Bransport, across from the gated courtyard of the House
of Draeids. His stomach was all slithering eels, and he couldn’t tell if it was
from too much drink the night before or from the image he had in his head
of that girl screaming while they rendered her down to a mound of ash.
Strange how you can know that something is coming from a thousand
glimpses of it in the distance, and still be surprised when it flattens you.
This was a reckoning, and it’d been a long time coming.
Every evening at dusk he’d glimpsed it coming, when the city’s Burners
started belching smoke, and Lochled would find himself cringing as he
walked through flurries of sootfall, wondering if he would hear the screams
of the draeids as they burned. Wondering if he’d recognize his daughter’s
screams in among them.
Yes, he’d seen it coming then. And he’d ignored it.
His head pounded. Sweat tickled his eyebrows, smelling of barley
spirits. Mouth sour and gums tingling from too much scaef. He didn’t know
how long he stared at her, that slim, pale face with her white-blond hair
hanging limp about it. She sat so still, robed in white, like she might’ve
been just as much stone as the bench she sat upon.
His Libby would’ve been about the same age. Was she still alive too?
All he wanted in that moment was to escape. But he couldn’t seem to
feel his feet beneath him. Couldn’t tear his eyes away from the girl. And
everything had gone dark around the edges and overbright in the center, like
he was peering through a long black tunnel.
He felt like he’d stepped into a trap. He’d been a damn fool for coming
this way. Had, in fact, been avoiding this street for a very long time.
Terrified of exactly this.
A horrendous squeal made him jerk and spin to look behind him, his
shaking hands slipping to the long-knife and hand axe in his belt. A woman
stood a few paces from him, cranking a water wheel, brass keening against
brass. He blinked as a bead of sweat slipped into his eye. Why was he
suddenly sweating so much? And why couldn’t he seem to catch his breath?
As the woman finished cranking, the pipes began to rattle. Lochled
remembered a time not so long ago when you had to walk to the well for
your water. Now fucking lengths of tarnished brass crisscrossed walls of
wattle and daub, like cheap baubles on an old whore, and there were water
wheels on damn near every corner.
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