By the Sword Read Free Page A

neighbors, including men who had long-standing disagreements with each other, though not with Rathgar himself. That was why all weapons were forbidden in the Hall, and not especially welcome within the Keep walls. Except for Rathgar’s men, of course. No one would have felt safe guarded by men armed only with flower garlands and headless pikes. Rathgar had anticipated that too much drink might awaken old grievances or create new ones, and rouse tempers to blows.
    But after that fleeting thought, Kero somehow knew that this was something far more serious than a simple quarrel between two hot-tempered men, new grievance or old. Rathgar could handle either of those, and the noise was increasing, not abating.
    And that same nebulous instinct told her that she’d better not go see what was wrong in person.
    She braced herself against the wall with one hand, a hand of cold fear between her shoulder blades, and she realized that it was time to try something she had seldom dared attempt inside the Keep.
    She closed her eyes, and opened her mind to the thoughts of those around her.
    The walls she had forged about her mind had been wrought painfully over the years, and she didn’t drop them lightly, especially with so many people about. At first she had thought she was going mad with grief over her mother’s death, but chance reading had shown her otherwise. Her grandmother, the sorceress Kethry, had left several books with Lenore, and after her mother’s death, these had been given to Kero along with Lenore’s other personal possessions. Kero had never known what had prompted her to pick out that particular book, but she had blessed the choice as goddess-sent. The book had proved to her that the “voices” she had been hearing were really the strongest thoughts of those around her. More importantly to a confused young girl, the book had taught her how to block those voices out.
    But now she was going to have to remove those comforting barriers, for at least a moment.
    The clamor that flooded into her skull wasn’t precisely painful, but it was disorienting and exactly like being in a tiny room filled with twice the number of screaming, shouting people it was intended to hold.
    Steady on—it’s just like being in the kitchen—
    Her stomach lurched, and she clutched the wall behind her, as dizzy as if she’d been spun around like one of Lordan’s old toy tops.
    Pain and fear made those thoughts pouring into her mind incoherent; she got brief glimpses of armed men, strangers in no lord’s colors—men who were filthy, ragged, and yet well-armed and armored. She was half-aware of the servants, babbling with terror, streaming through the door opposite her, but most of her mind was caught up in the tangled mental panic outside that door. And now she was “seeing” things, too, and she nearly threw up. The strangers were making a slaughterhouse of the Great Hall, cutting down not only those who resisted, but those who were simply in their way.
    Their minds seized on hers and held it. She struggled to free herself from the confusion, wrenching her mind out of the desperate, unconscious clutching of theirs—and suddenly her thoughts brushed against something.
    Something horrible.
    There were no words for what she felt at that moment, as time stood frozen for her and she knew how a hunted rabbit must view a great, slavering hound. Whatever this was, it was cold, if a thought could be cold, cold as the slimy leeches living in the swampy fen below the cattle pastures. There was something sly about it, and filthy—not a physical filth, but a feeling that the mind behind these thoughts would never be contented with pleasures most folk considered normal. Kero couldn’t quite decipher them either; what she experienced was similar to what she had “heard” as her ability first appeared—as if she were listening to someone speaking too quietly for the exact