Free Age of Iron by Angus Watson Page A

weaknesses.
    “Wait a minute,” said Dionysia. “There would have been a boat here. Look, there’s a cut rope. What’s that!?”
    “What?” said Weylin.
    “There, downstream. It’s … I … I can’t see it now.”
    “Couldn’t ever see it, more like. She’s hiding back in the woods.”
    “Then why is the rope cut?”
    Their voices were quieter. Lowa risked looking up. The jetty and her pursuers were out of sight. She sat up and quietly paddled on. In the darkness ahead she saw Aithne’s eyes pleading for help that she hadn’t given. She saw Cordelia chop her way out of the mêlée only to be hacked down herself. She wondered if it was Maura or Realin’s hand that she’d seen fly up into the air. A shudder of anger, sorrow and disbelief lurched though her. She dropped her oar and doubled over with grief.
    No! She sat back up. Crying could come later. She would find out why Zadar had killed them, and tried to kill her, and she would have her revenge. First though she’d go back to Barton and get her bow and arrows. They wouldn’t expect that.
    She paddled on. The silvered black water was still, save for the gentle splash of her paddle. The silent woods watched her pass.

Chapter 9
    “W eylin, Dionysia! My favourite couple of the Fifty! Welcome!”
    They were the only couple in the Fifty, so it was a stupid thing to say. Felix’s Roman accent made his cheeriness seem all the more false. Weylin did not like Romans, especially Roman druids as creepy and powerful as Felix.
    King Zadar’s chief druid and second in command stood from his chair on the raised dais with a grin on his smooth face and his short arms raised in greeting. He wore his usual sleeveless blue leather jerkin and purple glass necklace. The necklace’s glass beads were each inlaid with a whorl of white, and it was said to be worth more than its weight in gold. Weylin wasn’t convinced. Glass was much easier to smash than gold, so how could it be worth more?
    Zadar wasn’t there, which was a relief. Even though he didn’t like Felix, Weylin much preferred the idea of explaining Lowa’s escape to him. Felix might be a cruel and unbending druid, uninterested in anyone’s welfare but the king’s and his own, and capable of conjuring up a formori that would bite your head off, but firstly he wasn’t Zadar, whose audiences had a much higher mortality rate, and secondly he was the height of a child and looked ridiculous. His light brown hair was thick but receding, his fringe a good ten fingers’ breadth from his eyebrows, like a furry hood pulled halfway back over an egg. He wore his sleeveless jerkin in an attempt to look like a Briton, but his haughty, unmistakably Roman face and flabby arms made him look like a bard dressed up for a role.
    Weylin was in fact dressed very similarly, and his hair had receded almost as much even though he was still in his late teens, but this didn’t faze him. He shaved his remaining hair back to a straight line across his skull so it looked like his hairline was a choice. What remained hung down his back in a thick, matted, manly tangle. The arms sticking out of his jerkin were thick with muscle and already badly scarred, and he was a good two heads taller than Felix. Some said he had a big nose, but he knew it was a strong nose. The difference between him and Felix was that he looked good. And he was British.
    Felix sat back down between Zadar’s two bodyguards. Why does such a powerful druid need bodyguards? wondered Weylin. To the Roman’s right, small wooden and iron shield in one massive hand and short curved wooden-handled blade in the other, was the giant German Tadman Dantadman. He looked like he’d taken a much smaller man’s head but kept his own face, so he was all chin, nose and deep-set eyes protruding from a comically small skull. A blond moustache the size of a small broom head and a tussle of blond hair tied into a topknot added to the effect. As always, he was wearing a heavy fur