Free The Reluctant Berserker by Alex Beecroft Page B

own.”
    Despite the pain of his wounded side, he laughed. “Children have a venom greater than that of any adder, and yet we are powerless to do aught but cherish them.”
    “You are not meant to be healing me.” She helped him sit forwards, so that she could sing the charm of nine spikes into his mouth, and into both ears, and into the open wound. She could feel his laughter under her hands when she combined the herb and apple mix with the ash and fennel water and spread it on, pleasantly warm.
    “…all weeds may now spring up as herbs. Seas and all salt water slip apart, while I blow this poison from you.”
    A roar of laughter and the shriek of a girl genuinely in distress yanked her attention back to her son. The wide smile on his likable face would not have been out of place in the jaw of a wolf. Saewyn did not at first comprehend what it was he had in his hand, white as wool, and then she saw the girl with her arms over her head, her elbows sticking up like horns as she bent her face down into the thicker shadows beneath the house’s one table.
    Cenred flourished the white cloth at her, snatching it back when she tried to take it, and laughed again.
    The potter was trying to struggle to his feet. Saewyn leaped up instead and hauled up the skirts of her dress with a sooty hand so that she could run across the floorboards and wrench the poor child’s wimple from her son’s hand. The slap she landed on his cheek cut off his laughter like a seax blade, and he looked at her as though she were a stranger.
    Shaking with anger, she didn’t care, but allowed the girl to take her covering and wind it back around her hair. “What?” she demanded, not recognising the bell-like iron tones of her own voice. “What do you think you… No, hush, I will hear your reasons at home. For now you will ask pardon of this young woman, before whom you have shamed your mother and your father and your own name.”
    Soothed by her fury, the potter leaned back heavily on his ledge, but his spare, muscular hands clenched and unclenched beside him, and his breath came hard.
    His daughter, decently covered once more, emerged out of the darkness with eyes tear-bright from shock. A tendril of brown hair curled out of the fabric and fell on her forehead, and it made the shame in Saewyn writhe like a nest of snakes. “I will, of course, not ask payment from you for any of your treatment henceforward Beorthread.”
    “That will pay for having my daughter’s hair exposed to the sight of a man, will it?” The gentle old man was gone—he took the insult as hard as she did.
    “Of course not. It will only express some of my regret that such a thing could have happened at the hands of my kin.”
    “And a daughter’s honour is worth so little?”
    “No!” Saewyn seized Cenred and pushed him further into the firelight. “Tell him you are sorry.”
    Cenred’s mouth had settled into sullen lines, and his eyes were a blade-thin glimmer. “She provoked me,” he said. “She was flirting. She let me kiss her. I thought a girl as immodest as that deserved to be exposed. Why should she be allowed to go on pretending to be virtuous, when she is nothing of the kind?”
    Saewyn and Beorthread were both silenced, and saw the same horror in one another’s eyes. As Saewyn wrestled with the thought that her own son could have so inherited his father’s meanness and cast about for something to do to make the situation less vile, a small voice spoke up from the shadow of the darkest corner.
    “I… It’s true.” The girl hid her face in her hands, starting at the touch of the curl, hastily tucking it back in. “I did—I thought he liked me, I did let him… I’m sorry, Father.”
    At once, the standoff crumbled. The potter sagged back onto his cushions, and he too covered his eyes. “I think perhaps you should go, Wise One. Shame has touched us all today, but if the fault was provoked, I shall not expect further geld for it. Sorrow is the spice