The Curse of Chalion by Lois McMaster Bujold EPUB & PDF – eBook Details Online
- Status: Available For Free Download
- Author: Lois McMaster Bujold
- Language: English
- Genre: Historical Fantasy
- Format: PDF / EPUB
- Size: 2 MB
- Price: Free
Cazaril heard the mounted horsemen on the road before he saw them. He
glanced over his shoulder. The well-worn track behind him curled up
around a rolling rise, what passed for a hill on these high windy plains,
before dipping again into the late-winter muck of Baocia’s bony soil. At his
feet a little rill, too small and intermittent to rate a culvert or a bridge,
trickled greenly across the track from the sheep-cropped pastures above.
The thump of hooves, jangle of harness, clink of bells, creak of gear and
careless echo of voices came on at too quick a rhythm to be some careful
farmer with a team, or parsimonious pack-men driving their mules.
The cavalcade trotted around the side of the rise riding two by two, in full
panoply of their order, some dozen men. Not bandits—Cazaril let out his
breath, and swallowed his unsettled stomach back down. Not that he had
anything to offer bandits but sport. He trudged a little way off the track and
turned to watch them pass.
The horsemen’s chain shirts were silvered, glinting in the watery morning
sunlight, for show, not for use. Their tabards of blue, dyes almost matching
one with another, were worked with white in the sigil of the Lady of Spring.
Their gray cloaks were thrown back like banners in the breeze of their
passing, pinned at their shoulders with silver badges that had all the tarnish
polished off today. Soldier-brothers of ceremony, not of war; they would
have no desire to get Cazaril’s stubborn bloodstains on those clothes.
To Cazaril’s surprise, their captain held up a hand as they came near. The
column crashed raggedly to a halt, the squelch and suck of the hooves
trailing off in a way that would have had Cazaril’s father’s old horse-master
bellowing grievous and entertaining insults at such a band of boys as this.
Well, no matter.
“You there, old fellow,” the leader called across the saddlebow of his
banner-carrier at Cazaril.
Cazaril, alone on the road, barely kept his head from swiveling around to
see who was being so addressed. They took him for some local farm lout,
trundling to market or on some errand, and he supposed he looked the part:
worn boots mud-weighted, a thick jumble of mismatched charity clothes
keeping the chill southeast wind from freezing his bones. He was grateful to
all the gods of the year’s turning for every grubby stitch of that fabric, eh.
Two weeks of beard itching his chin. Fellow indeed. The captain might with
justice have chosen more scornful appellations. But . . . old?
The captain pointed down the road to where another track crossed it. “Is
that the road to Valenda?”
It had been . . . Cazaril had to stop and count it in his head, and the sum
dismayed him. Seventeen years since he had ridden last down this road,
going off not to ceremony but to real war in the provincar of Baocia’s train.
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