Dusk Read Free

moving.
    Kosar hid in the shadow of an overhanging rock on the valley slope, fascinated and terrified by what he was seeing. And seconds before he saw the Monk keel over and lie still at last, he caught sight of another shape beyond the village. It was on the facing hillside, so distant as to be little more than a speck moving on the gray rock face. Someone climbing quickly, fear urging them on. Another survivor.
    Kosar wondered who it was. There were plenty down there he would never mourn, but there were also those that had shown him some measure of kindness. Looking at the sun bleeding down into the horizon, he knew that he had to find out. He would follow the survivor and perhaps they would share their stories.
    Kosar was a branded thief who had lost the only place he had ever even thought of calling home. There was nothing better for him to do.

Chapter 2
    RAFE BABURN SAT huddled on the hillside and stared down at the ruin of his life.
    He was shivering, though it was still warm. Sweat beaded his skin, and the setting sun was still strong enough to bake his scalp, yet he shook and shuddered like a sheebok pulled from a mountain stream. He tried to cry out but his voice had gone, eaten away by shock. His memory too, slaughtered as surely as those children on the bridge, the militia outside the whorehouse. And his parents.
    His father, probably still clasping the rusty old crossbow he’d not had the chance to fire.
    His mother . . .
    But no, he would not think of that. He could not. He must think of something else, turn from the village and stare at a rock, wonder what it had seen in its long life, explore underneath to see if there were any secrets hidden—
    She had run to his father where he lay bleeding on the stilted platform in front of their home. He was dead already, Rafe knew, but still his mother went to him, perhaps thinking that her love could mend all wounds. The sword whispered through the air and sang a song of violence as it buried itself in her chest. She fell with the sword still in her, and the killer, the murdering bastard, placed his red-booted foot on her breasts to lever the blade from bone and flesh.
    Rafe had wanted to close his eyes. Hiding beneath the platform, dust showered down over his face. His father’s blood had already pattered onto his forehead and dripped into one eye, and now his mother’s blood was adding to it, urging him to drift away, forget what he had seen and never dream of it again. The blood was as warm as his parents’ hands on his forehead when he was having nightmares as a child. Or his father’s fingertips, massaging Rafe’s tense scalp when he had so recently woken from strange dreams, unknown voices still muttering inside his head.
    But he had not been able to look away. He was afraid that if he closed his eyes, then the man in red— clicking and clacking as the arrows piercing his body knocked together—would find him. The murderer paused, standing with a foot at either side of Rafe’s dead mother, staring into the house. Rafe heard a sniff as he tested the air. He seemed undecided, unsure of whether or not to venture into the house or move on to the next. His decision was made for him when two screaming men charged onto the platform, attacking him with rusty swords.
    The man had swatted them aside and opened them up as they fell to the ground. Several arrows whispered through the air and thudded into his chest and arms, and he left the platform to pursue the shooters.
    Rafe had waited for a little while, terrified to move, listening to the sound of death around him. It shifted across the village, tagged onto the red-robed man like his own shadow and, when Rafe judged it to be sufficiently distant, he ran.
    He had tried not to look at his parents. He could smell them as he scrambled from beneath the wooden platform and he could hear the drip, drip of blood as it ran between the boards. He did not want to see them lying there dead. He wanted to remember them as