Aster Wood and the Blackburn Son Read Free Page B

face to face with him, pushing his chest against him until he was forced to take a step backward.  
    “Yeah, alright, Dormir,” said the man, his voice tinged with fear now. It was the man who had first complained. “Alright, we’ll wait for the boss then.”  
    Dormir stopped moving, and the two stood still, chest to chest. Dormir stared into the other man’s face, but the man’s eyes stayed fixed on the dirt. Then he spoke softly, his words just barely audible over the crackle of the fire.
    “Oh, I don’t know that we need to wait for the blood the boss promised,” Dormir said, his voice slippery and smooth. “Do you?” He turned his head towards the men surrounding him, a wicked smile playing on his lips. Several of them looked frightened. But a handful of others could not betray their true reaction to his words; they looked, unmistakably, hungry .  
    In a flash, Dormir crossed his arm over his torso and backhanded the man across the jaw. His howl of pain was quickly drowned beneath the sound of the other warriors, who now jumped onto him, screaming and punching, as he stumbled to the ground. Shouts of victory and pain pierced the quiet as the men fell into a brawling pile, and soon the entire company was a blur of punching fists.  
    I must have stopped breathing, though my mouth hung wide. When I realized this, it took me several long moments to convince my throat to open. When it finally did, my first gasp of air resulted in a coughing fit I couldn’t quiet. But they didn’t hear me over the fight, their sickening laughter mixing with howls of agony, filling the night. Dormir spoke again, but my ears were ringing too loudly for me to understand him. My whole body shaking, I frantically backed away.
    My foot knocked into something hard, and the surprise of the sensation sent me reeling again. I turned, praying it had been a stone.  
    But it was no stone. Standing as tall as he dared along the edge of the firelight, one side of his face purple from Dormir’s blow, stood the boy I had heard.  
    I froze, not knowing what to do. Would he yell for help? Turn me in? I rolled onto my back and raised my hands in front of me silently. He just stared down, his eyes as wide as mine, his body shaking, too.  
    A shout from the men broke our gaze, and the boy’s head whipped up. They were dancing now, a sort of rhythmic stomping of the hard ground around the fire. The fight was over.  
    I made a split second decision and grabbed the boy’s hand, pulling him firmly to the ground beside me. I clasped my hand over his mouth, but he soon stopped struggling.  
    “Don’t scream,” I breathed into his ear. “I’m not going to hurt you.”
    Tears rolled down his dirty cheeks.
    “You can’t scream, or they’ll come for us both,” I said. “Do you understand?”
    He nodded. Slowly I released my hand from over his mouth. He turned to look at me. He was young, much younger than I had thought. Eight, maybe nine years old at the most.  
    “What is going on here?” I asked. “How did you get here? This isn’t the place for a kid.” It wasn’t a place for anyone.
    “We were taken,” he said softly, his voice choked with tears.  
    “Who are they?” I motioned towards the fire. “Where are they going?”
    “They are the Coyle’s army,” he said. “They stole us in the night, killed our families. Now we serve them or die.”
    “Us?” I asked. “Who is us?”
    “The children. We are the servants of the Coyle. It is upon our backs that the war will be waged.” His voice was monotone, as if he were reciting a passage of text he had memorized.
    What?
    “War? What war?”
    He looked confused.
    “I—I don’t know,” he said. “It’s just a war. That’s what they said.”
    I looked up at the men again. The firelight played with their features, flickering across their demonic faces as they danced around it.
    “Where are you going?” I asked again, not taking my eyes off the men.
    The boy lowered