Free Dead Stars - Part One (The Emaneska Series) by Ben Galley Page A

the bright candles had turned the balcony windows opaque. The three on the balcony were invisible for now.
    Just as Modren turned to leave again, he leant forward and gave Elessi a long kiss on the cheek. She laughed and pushed him away, and he left. As Elessi went back to her cleaning, a wide smile on her face, Tyrfing turned back to Heimdall. He sighed. ‘And what magick words is Loki going to use to get my nephew back?’
    Heimdall was still watching the maid. ‘That, I believe, is up to her .’
    Tyrfing couldn’t help but sneer. ‘Elessi?’
    The god turned back to the city. ‘Elessi, and her husband-to-be, of course.’

Chapter 3
    “Father, Father, why do the stars shimmer and shake?”
    “Son, Son, because everybody shakes when they know they are soon to die. Even a god.”
    Excerpt from the book ‘The Righteous are the Foolish,’ author not known
    A  day later, and half a world away, Albion could only dream of Spring. Spring may have sprung in mainland Emaneska, but in Albion, it was running late. Here winter was still playing the last few bars of its dreary tune, a little ditty of drizzling rain and cold, careless, sleet. Like a talentless skald down on his luck, it knew its time on the earth was short. A storm was gathering over the sea in the east. That night there would be a thunderous finale to winter’s song.
    The man crouching on a slimy branch, halfway up the old, cracked oak tree didn’t care for the rain. Nor did he mind it. He had seen more than his fair share of dark and dreary afternoons in his time. One more wasn’t going to kill him. Besides, it made his job easier. A grey blanket of clouds had stolen away the sun. The afternoon was dark and gloomy, wrapped in premature shadow. The perfect sort of afternoon for killing.
    The man reached up and flicked a bothersome drip from the lip of his black hood, and then reached down to massage his right leg. It had gone to sleep about an hour ago and was now stubbornly refusing to wake up. The man reached up to the gnarled, twisted finger of a tree branch that hung above his head and lifted himself up so he could move around without falling. With a grunt, he kicked his sleepy leg aside with the other and then settled back into a seated position on the slimy bough that was his perch. The fingers of sleep were slowly beginning to paw at him, like misty hands reaching up from the sodden bracken below him. He scrunched up his eyes and rolled his tired shoulders in a circle, hearing the wet leather of his cloak squeak.
    There was a muted rumble in the distance as the storm tested its voice. The man looked up through the tangled, leafless, branches of the half-dead oak and spied the faint flicker amongst a cluster of dark, faraway clouds.
    Gripping the branch above his head again, he wiggled his sleepy leg until it had thoroughly woken from its numb slumbers, and then side-stepped along the thicker branch until he could hold himself against the rough trunk of the oak. He looked down at the ground beneath him, covered and obscured as it was by the sea of dark green brackens and brighter ferns that seemed to infest this side of the forest. It was quite the fall, for an ordinary man.
    Farden had never been an ordinary man.
    With a scrape, his boots slid from the branch and he plummeted into the bracken below. There was a snap, a crack, and then a resounding thud as Farden collided with solid ground. With no more than a wince, he stood, grunted, and simply flicked a bracken frond out of his face with a grimy finger. He pushed his way into the undergrowth, heading for the dirt road he knew was only a stone’s throw away from the foot of the oak.
    Farden crouched at the edge of it, watching the rain do battle with its broken cobbles. It was an old road, old and tired; the well-worn wheel ruts were testament to its age, as were the patches of churned mud and puddles where greedy peasants had dug free and liberated entire barrowloads of cobblestones, for use in