Free Dragonheart by Charles Edward POGUE Page B

visage.
    Einon gulped his wine and glowered into the fire. The flashing daggers of flame brought to mind the smithy’s fire at the quarry and the red-haired girl framed in its blaze, cradling a dead man. Red hair melting into red fire. So striking. So familiar . . .
    . . . As familiar as the savory smells and rowdy sounds that drifted up from the banquet hall. He had left his knights there, gorging on the table-bending bounty of their hunt. He heard their belching laughter. He heard the screeching titters of their bawds. He heard the lutes of the minstrels. He heard the wail of the red-haired girl as he slew her father . . .
    Einon took another deep swallow of wine and idly rubbed his chest. He noticed the old scar on the back of his hand. The girl had said the blind man suffered from the crippling sickness. He often wondered if his hand was afflicted with it too. He remembered the first day he felt the pain in it. The day Bowen left him. His first day as king.
    Then, just over a year ago, the great pain came. Terrible shooting pain that had sent him into screaming collapse. Three days he spent writhing in bed, recovering from it. The doctors had been hopeless dolts. Even the mysterious ointments and salves of his mother could not ease the pain. But she had known it would stop. “Give it time, my son, the wound must heal,” had been her strange advice. Strange, because it wasn’t a wound at all. Just vicious pain. He had not cut it, or bruised it, been bitten or stung. Just a phantom pain coming from nowhere and leaving no mark.
    But Aislinn had been right. The pain subsided after a week, leaving only a numbness in his fingers that lingered for months. It affected his sword grip for a long time, and fearing the injury permanent, he painstakingly taught himself how to wield a blade in his left hand. He was not as proficient as with his right, but a “sinister” assault was so alien to his opponents, it proved unusually effective.
    Eventually he regained the power and flexibility of his right hand. Every now and then there was a twitch, a twinge, a little stiffness. But when it grasped a blade hilt now, it was as formidable as ever. Perhaps his mother was right. Perhaps it was a wound and not the crippling disease. He ran the bottom of his goblet across the white scar on his hand back, even paler than his white skin.
    Perhaps his hand had never healed properly after that rebel chieftain sliced it. That dog who killed his father. He had blinded that peasant too, Einon recalled. He wondered what happened to him. Probably died in the quarry long ago. Most did. Prey to rock slides or the elements or just the brutal grind of the work. Odd. Einon was unable to remember the man’s face. Only his towering height and the color of his hair. It was red. Red like the hair of the girl today.
    She had nerve, that girl. Facing his arrows like that. Nerve and pride. He had seen it in her eyes. It was her eyes that had held back his bow hand. Eyes that were older than her youthful face. Grim and weary of life, yet alluringly defiant. He didn’t even know if she had been pretty or not. All he saw were her eyes. And they were beautiful . . . and bitter . . . and knowing . . . fringed with thick lashes and arched by fine brows. Deep brown moist pools that threatened to drown him in their flooding contempt. That was why he had shot the old man; so he wouldn’t succumb to those eyes. To reassert his mastery over this brazen, peasant wench who dared to shame him with her haunting gaze.
    But, in truth, it was her hair. Even more than her eyes. Her hair flowing out from her hood as she ran to her father. Her hair, falling in a tousled riot about her face as she knelt by the old man. Her hair. It fascinated him, seeming to entwine its red locks about his brain until he could not untangle his thoughts from them.
    Her red, red hair. A scarlet starburst captured in the burning shimmer of the smithy’s fire. A halo of flame within a halo of flame.