Free The Very Best of Kate Elliott by Kate Elliott Page A

Battle had strung them taut. She had no trouble hearing their too loud voices.
    “. . . said they saw someone running in this direction, my lord.”
    “I want him dead,” said the lord in a high coarse voice.“This is all for naught if he is not dead.”
    “My lord, we came the wrong way,” said a second retainer, his tone brittle with nerves. “This is the witch’s tree, the hanging tree. It has an angry and hateful spirit.”
    The Hanging Woman was already here. Her shadows swelled with the rope of fear. The horses shifted nervously, ears flaring. In the sky above, clouds crept toward the moon.
    Why not? What weapon had she, except her wits?
    She raised her arms to make the shawl flutter like dark wings.
    “Here are you come, so which is it who will offer himself to my rope?” she said in a voice that carried across the clearing lit with a gauzy glamour.“I take one for my noose.”
    The moon slid beneath the cloud. A gust of wind shook through the vast branches. An owl hooted from the verge, and there came out of the forest the sound of a clop of horse’s hooves, slow and steady as the approach of death.
    The Hanging Woman was coming.
    Night, and the oak’s mighty shadow, did the rest.
    The Forlangers turned tail and rode back the way they had come, toward the fields and buildings of West Hall. Brush rattled around them, marking their passage, and one man shouted as he lost control of his horse.
    The cloud passed, and the moon re-emerged. The shadows untangled, and Uwe rose with wide eyes from the bitterberry where he had been hiding and dashed across the clearing to fetch up beside her.
    She hoisted the heavy sword. “Was that you, with the owl call? I reckon I have heard you test that other times.”
    He grinned, then popped his tongue in his mouth to make the clop-clap hoofbeat sound.
    She laughed, then frowned, for it was dangerous to insult the Hanging Woman.“They will come back,” she said.“If not at night, then at dawn. You must help me carry him to the rose bower.”
    Uwe did not want to enter the cleft. Into that cleft one night several years ago the Hanging Woman had dragged the person Uwe had been before, and he had emerged changed, become what he was now.
    Anna grasped his elbow and shook him. “The wounded soldier is General Olivar himself. The Forlangers mean to kill him. If they do, there will be nothing but theft and indignity for us and all our kin. You see that, do you not?”
    He nodded. They all knew it was true.
    The general had fallen unconscious again although he was still breathing. They dragged him as gently as possible out of the cleft. In the moonlight, Anna unclasped his coat of plate armor and cut away padding and under-tunic to lay bare the wound. It was just above his hip, in the meat and muscle of the torso. She bent to sniff at it, and while the scent of blood was strong, it seemed the blade had missed his gut for there was no fetid sewage breath from the cut.
    That meant he might live.
    If they worked quickly and covered their tracks.
    They got his coat of plates off him, which woke him up, but he was a soldier who did not complain or panic. He just watched, eyes fluttering with pain, as she bound the wound with strips cut from his tunic.
    Because he was awake, it was easiest to drape him over Uwe and let the slight man walk with the general’s weight on him. Anna followed with the sword and the coat of plates. They halted beyond the clearing so she could go back with a branch and confuse the ground to make sure no one guessed they had been there.
    “Leaf and branch and grass and vine. Let them see but see nothing.”
    The old cunning woman had lived for six years in the wood, wintering in the oak and living the other seasons in a hidden refuge. During the time she had bided at Witch’s Hill, the Hanging Woman had never once ridden out.
    There is more than one kind of power in the world.
    They made their way into the trees, following trails in the dim light all the