Free The Broken World by J.D. Oswald

nest of some vast bird. Her face was thin, her long hair ragged and matted. As he watched her, she shivered, drawing her knees up to her chest for warmth. He looked around the huge room, saw the fireplace empty and black, the desk strewn with papers blown about by gusts from the open window. How high up were they here? How cold would it get? Would she freeze to death here, abandoned? She mustn’t sleep; he knew that much about the cold. You had to stay awake.
    ‘Martha!’ Errol tried to shout, but his voice sounded distant and muffled.
    ‘Martha!’ She rolled over, eyes still tightly closed, arms wrapped around her legs, head tucked in over her chest. Still his voice was too quiet, almost mumbled.
    ‘Martha!’ This time he shouted with all his might, and at the same instant he realized he had been bodiless, his muscles contracted, pitching him forward. For a moment too terribly short he saw Martha open her eyes, look up, see him. And then he was awake, back in the woods, gasping for air as his horse looked on placidly.
    Errol tried to get back to sleep. He slumped back against the tree and closed his eyes tight, but his heart was racing, his mind fully awake. He gave up, full of anguish for Martha’s plight, more determined than ever to find Benfro and the other dragon that might or might not be Sir Trefaldwyn.
    The air glowed with pre-dawn light as he led his horse back to the road and mounted. Not a mile from his resting place he came upon a series of low buildings, labourers’ cottages for a nearby farm. They were still shut up at this early hour, not even a dog or a goose running out to chase him as he rode slowly past. Some even had the look of being unoccupied, but at the last cottage a line of washing was strung between two gnarled apple trees. Shawls, blouses and skirts hung in a row, dry save for the lightest of morning dews. He was reminded of how his mother would sometimes leave clothes out when she knew there would be no rain in the night. ‘It makes them softer,’ she had always told him, though sometimes he wondered if it wasn’t just that she had been too tired to bring it all in and fold it up.
    It came to him in a flash, an idea so daring and yet so obvious he wondered why he hadn’t thought of it before. A few dozen paces past the row of houses, where he was hidden from view by the trees that surrounded the small hamlet, he stopped and dismounted, then walked quietly back to the washing line. There was no fence separating the road from the garden, and it was a matter of seconds to help himself to what he needed: one skirt of heavy tweed, a pair of canvas trousers of the sort he had seen farm girls wearing, one white cotton blouse and a shawl.
Errol counted out coins from the bag Lord Gremmil had given him, more than enough to compensate for the purloined clothes, and placed them in the pocket of one of the remaining dresses, careful not to let them chink against each other.
    By the time he made it back to his horse, the clothes rolled up under one arm, his heart was pounding. And yet he felt a thrill of excitement. He’d got away with it. Only once he had hauled himself back into the saddle and ridden away from the houses did Errol realize just how much he was shaking. What if he had been caught? How would he have even begun to explain to some burly farmer why he was stealing women’s clothes?
    He rode on, fretting that someone would come galloping up from behind. It could be the rider from the tavern, or the farmer, or Duke Dondal and the king’s army. It could have been Inquisitor Melyn come to drag him back to Emmass Fawr. Shaking the fear from his head, Errol kicked his horse into a trot and scanned the horizon for the next copse.
    After the incident at Lord Gremmil’s grain stores when one of Dondal’s soldiers had mistaken him for a girl, Errol had thought of taking a knife to his hair. Not having a knife, he had resorted to tying it in a long ponytail and tucking it down the back of