Free B007IIXYQY EBOK by Donna Gillespie

sound the alarm before they reached the farmlands and villages. To do this, she must reach the ford in Elk River before them—which would not prove too difficult if the pony kept his pace.
    She leaned far over the pony’s bristly mane, holding back a raw cry of joy. She felt like a racehorse released, eager to test speed to the limit. Here was adventure that was not mere child’s imaginings. Always she felt a pull to be at the center of the fray, as if all life existed there. She would never go round a ditch or high wall if she thought she could send her pony over it. There was a strain of madness in the family, she often heard Hertha say, that skipped only Hertha herself. Baldemar had it in great measure and he had passed it on to Auriane.
    She felt, too, the brash pride of the young: I saw them first, and I will be first with the alarm. She called on Epona, goddess of horses, and prayed the heron feather affixed to Brunwin’s bridle would make him swift. It was, she thought, a cowardly time to strike—the most celebrated warriors of her people had not yet returned from their last foray, an attack on a detachment of Roman soldiers erecting a line of wooden watchtowers on the Taunus Mountain, which lay deep in the territories her people claimed as their own.
    The signal towers had been burned and the Romans driven off—though she knew they would return; they were persistent as horse flies. But the warriors had not broken camp because Wido—the second powerful chieftain of the tribe and her father’s enemy—delayed them with an endless dispute over the spoil, haggling over every last silver horse bit or ivory-handled dagger that had been taken. “He waits to see what I want,” Baldemar reported to Athelinda in a runner’s message, “and it becomes what he wants.” Because of Wido’s petty greed, she thought, her people’s fields and villages were left vulnerable, protected by the old, the very young, and the farm women whose knowledge of weapons did not extend beyond hurling pots and stones.
    Maid and pony shot through the deep shade of a stand of olive-gray beeches, galloping almost soundlessly over a sandy forest floor and into a muddy meadow divided by a melancholy line of willows. The path sloped steeply downward into Wolf’s Head Bog, and for the first time this place did not fill her with spirit-terror; she knew only the excitement of the race. Here nature’s corpse was laid out rotting. The brackish pools to either side of the narrow path were graves, crowded with the remains of generations of men given in the spring sacrifice or convicted of great crimes and drowned by the Assembly of the Moon. At night their spirits took the form of the fire that played over the water, the baleful will-o’-the-wisps, beckoning anyone who ventured close to join them in restless death. She whipped past the maternal bulk of the Initiation Stone, half hidden among tall ferns, where Athelinda had brought her for her ceremonies of womanhood; it was still stained with her first moon blood. Near it was a cluster of smooth, faceless wooden images of the goddess Fria, springing like mischievous mushrooms from the damp. Lady of the Bog, she prayed silently, protect me from the wrath of the living and of the dead.
    The pony scrambled up a steep slope and clattered onto drier ground. As they whipped past the tortured shape of the Lightning Oak, she averted her eyes. In that corpse of a tree, her grandmother told her, were imprisoned the souls of all the wretches who let kinsmen lie unavenged. When she was still so young she was not allowed to ride alone, Hertha had brought her there and cuffed her until she memorized the words— “If one of our own is slain, I must draw blood in return, even if it takes to the end of my days. Vengeance is holy, it gives life to the clan.”
    As they struggled up the long, fir-clad rise, she judged herself close enough to the villages to sound the alarm. Taking up the cattle horn that hung at