A Song of Ruin and Rage by Makenzie Marshall EPUB & PDF – eBook Details Online
- Status: Available for Free Download
- Author: Makenzie Marshall
- Language: English
- Genre: Fairy Tale Fantasy
- Format: PDF / EPUB
- Size: 2 MB
- Price: Free
EIFIAN
Barabryn Village, Capital Road, Warden-Realm of Esgynedd
15 Days Before the Meet
The sun climbed up through the sky, dawning and red, as he found the
hanged girl.
She dangled from a tall yew tree, twisting in the wind like a doll, her face
unhuman in its swollen purpleness. Flies buzzed thick around her. The
ravens fluttered up from pecking at her bones to caw at Eifian in annoyance
as he neared. She was young. He knew the folk reached adulthood at
younger ages than the gentry, but surely this girl, even by her village’s
standards, would still have been a child. They had strung her up above a
sign, one marking access to the village.
Beneath the village’s name etched
into the wood, a new message had been scrawled hastily in ugly writing: NO
OTHEREDS. Beyond the tree, beyond her broken body, Eifian saw the
outlines of thatched roofs, the passing silhouettes of villagers, the trails of
hearth-smoke blurring the horizon. The people who killed her were there,
safe in their homes, eating or laughing or working, safe and not dead, safe in
the knowledge that they were not the ones with no breath in their lungs and a
rope around their necks.
He ached to ride through the village and disrupt their serenity, to enact the
same sort of arbitrary justice the girl received on the men who killed her. He
knew, logically, that he shouldn’t. The road spread out solemnly before him,
stretching all the way to the horizon. It was a long way to the capital. He
could still hear the voice of his uncle’s messenger, as clear in his ears as the
sound of crunched earth beneath his horse’s hooves, as biting as the wind
whipping past.
‘It must be you.’ The messenger’s face had paled in the faint light, his
breath—rapid and not yet rallied from exertion—clouding around his face.
The cold of the reception hall crowded around them all, its hearth-fire
nothing more than blackened coals. ‘Your father would arouse too much
suspicion arriving so close to the Meet. Your brother’s presence would be
highly irregular. It must be you, Arl. Be quick!’
Eifian was not sure when, exactly, he had awoken that morning. Roused
from a dreamless sleep and brought into the hall, bare feet padding cold
against the stone, he’d listened to the summons in silence as the words rolled
off the tongue of a hooded messenger. His father had stood beside him in the
blue-black yawn of nascent dawn, frowning, a feathered robe concealing his
nightclothes.
Eifian’s muscles had tensed then, growing tighter with each
enunciation as the stipulations of his summoning were revealed line by
line. ‘What could possibly be wrong?’ he had said, frustration gnawing at his
composure. The cold floors bit into his exposed flesh like ghoulish fingers
grasping at his ankles from the depths of the Unworld. ‘Surely it can’t be
anything too serious. We aren’t at war. Sylfaen are active as always, of
course, but they’re not really a threat in the capital, and—’
His father’s voice had drowned out his complaints with that deep,
authoritative tenor that made Eifian feel like a child again. ‘You know your
uncle, Eifian. You know this is significant.’
For More Read Download This Book
EPUB