Free ARC: Sunstone by Freya Robertson Page B

cases. Imma still wore the dress Catena could remember her wearing when her daughter had been appointed Captain of the Guard seven years ago, although it had been patched with so many other pieces of cloth that it was barely recognisable.
    Catena sat opposite her mother and took her hands. There was little flesh on them, the skin lying over the bones like finest linen draped over thin wooden sticks. Like most mothers, Catena supposed, Imma had given everything she had to her husband and the six children who had been born alive. As the eldest, Catena had watched Imma’s body expand and retract over the years until her firm muscles had turned soft like kneaded dough, and the once-bright light of passion and enthusiasm had faded from her eyes to leave them dull and flat like muddy puddles.
    So many times Catena had tried to help – with time, with encouragement, even with money once she began to earn her own wage at the castle. But it was never enough. Other babies came from the womb without a breath, and three of her siblings had died in the mines. Sickness and hunger ravaged a house that did not have the food and energy to fight it, and sometimes she felt as if a veil of grief and regret hung over a home that should have been vibrant with the energies of the children inside.
    “I suppose you are going,” Imma said, looking down at their linked hands. Her once-brown hair hung in a grey curtain, glittering with shining threads like the veins of silver that ran through the castle rock. “I wish you would stay here.”
    “I know.” Catena longed to wrench her hands free from the cold, grey sparrow’s feet she held and run out into the bright sunshine, but she forced herself to sit still. “I will be back,” she murmured, leaning forward to plant a kiss on Imma’s crown.
    “Will you?” Imma whispered. “I do not think so, somehow.”
    After they had said their goodbyes, Catena mused on those words as she mounted her horse and rode away. The house lay on the outskirts of Harlton, and she skirted the town via the coastal road, then re-entered through the southern gatehouse and dismounted on the cobbled street. It was market day and a good majority of the town’s inhabitants were in the central square plying their trades. The roads were busy with traffic from Prampton, Quillington and Widdington as carts brought sheep fleeces and hides, sacks of oats, barley and flour, barrels of apples and flagons of wine to exchange for the silver, gold, iron ore and precious gems that the Harlton folk mined from the hills in the west, as well as the superior armour their blacksmiths made.
    As she followed the road east, however, the traffic thinned and the day grew quieter. She slowed the horse to a walk and breathed in the salty southerly breeze. Here the city seemed less polluted by the noxious fumes from the blacksmiths, and the jungle thinned, giving way to flowered borders and the occasional village green with its pond, complete with ducks.
    She supposed she should have trawled through the taverns to find her father to say goodbye, but she didn’t think he would miss her. Her fingers rose to trace the faint scar on her right cheek, caused by a blow from his belt buckle when she was younger. He’d always been a cruel man, and he resented her position at the castle. She would not waste her time tracking him down only to have him shower her with sarcastic comments.
    The lane turned south and she dismounted and tied the horse to a beech tree outside the Temple wall. Then she turned the handle on the wooden door and went through.
    Catena paused as the path forked, wondering which to take. To the right stood the old stone Temple that had once encased the town’s primary oak tree, which had been moved stone by stone thirty feet to the right at the beginning of the Second Era. The Temple still housed plaques to the dead and places to light candles and pray, but the tree to her left now grew exposed to the elements.
    It stood in a ring