Free The Sword and the Sorcerer by Norman Winski Page A

happen on her back in a dirty, foul-smelling alley, beneath the weight of a swinish Cromwell soldier? Mercy, oh Lord! Mercy!
    Rouke began stroking the inside of her thighs with the sharp edge of his dagger, reveling in the terror screwing up her pretty features. “When one dagger won’t do—the other will.”
    He dropped the knife on the cobbles, used one hand to keep her thighs spread and with his other hand steered the purplish head of his shaft to the threshold of her womanhood.
    She screamed again and again, ripping the night’s silence to shreds.
    “I like to hear my women scream!”
    His two cohorts laughed at the girl’s misery and urged Rouke to enter, so that they too could partake of her lavish body.
    Just before he parted her lips with two fingers a brusque noise from behind distracted him and he looked over his shoulder.
    Standing no more than ten feet behind the soldiers was a young giant of a man, smacking away on a huge bone of meat, a glitter of mischief in his startlingly blue eyes. The hand holding the thighbone was covered with some kind of a steel brace.
    Rouke saw that the interruption had opened the girls eyes and she too stared, as they all did, at this outrageously handsome dog who dared interrupt his pleasure, only her look was fraught with shame to be seen naked and sprawled this way.
    Rouke assumed he was just a wanderer off the street intrigued by the wench’s screams. “Leave, pig, or die!”
    The intruder didn’t budge. In fact he seemed resolute to stay.
    “You call me pig?” Talon asked with amused disdain, adding, “Sir Pig.”
    Rouke began to stuff his shrinking member back into his cockpiece and started to rise. “Why, you dirty rotten—”
    He never finished his sentence because Talon slammed the huge thighbone he had been munching on into Rouke’s face, sending him reeling unconscious to the cobbles. One of the other men went for his sword but Talon bludgeoned him unconscious too before he got off his knees. Panicky, the third guard managed to get to his feet, but in his eagerness to flee he forgot they were locked into a dead end and he ran right into the wall, head hung low, knocking himself out.
    Talon roared with laughter at this bit of stupidity, even while appraising the lovely girl’s face and bare breasts.
    Still shaken and dazed from the ordeal, Alana started to push herself up from the cobbles but fell down again. She was weaker than she thought. The tall, broad-shouldered stranger offered her a hand and she took it. With one gentle, firm pull he lifted her to her feet but continued to clasp her hand. Energy from an inexhaustable supply seemed to pour from him through his hand and into her, reviving her.
    “I owe you my life, sir.”
    He shrugged as if he had been doing this sort of thing all of his life and still did not let go of her hand.
    “You’re all right now,” he reassured her. “Stop shaking. You’re safe, I say.”
    She caught him gazing with too much appreciation at her breasts and she suddenly remembered she was naked from the waist up. She tore her hand from his clasp and covered her breasts with both hands, flushed with embarrassment.
    Talon wanted to reassure her that he meant her no harm and moved to comfort her in his arms. But she recoiled and hissed at him.
    “Stay away!”
    He stopped and shrugged his massive shoulders once more. There was no point in remaining. She was safe now. And probably anxious to escape to some lover she lived with in one of these squalid stone hovels. He would have liked immensely to taste one of those tempting strawberries that peeked out between her fingers but that obviously wasn’t meant to be. He nodded a goodbye, turned on his heels and took long strides walking out of the alley. He had more important things on his mind than wenching anyway—regardless how incredibly appetizing that particular wench happened to be.
    Alana watched the gorgeous young warrior fade out of the alley, dumbfounded. Never had she