Fire Hawk Read Free Page B

after you’re gone.”
    “I will die here,” Kane said. “Will it be that soon? Or are you that much younger than I, then, that you will be here so long after?”
    “No,” Tal said, with no clarification of which question he was answering. Kane knew better than to ask; Tal wasn’t in the habit of explaining himself, and Kane had too many secrets of his own to pry into another man’s.
    “Where have you been hiding these last weeks?” he asked instead.
    Tal gestured vaguely, a motion that took in far too much area with only one common characteristic, which he then spoke in a tone as vague as the gesture.
    “Down there.”
    Kane’s mouth quirked. “Oh.”
    That got Tal’s attention. “It’s getting . . . quite ugly down off the mountain.”
    Kane went still. “It has always been ugly down there.”
    “But it is worse now. The warlords are slaughtering innocents as well as each other. People who have lived in peace for countless years. Who know nothing of fighting.”
    “What the warlords—all of them—do,” Kane said, enunciating carefully, “means nothing to me.”
    “And why should it?” Tal said easily.
    “Precisely.” It was flat, unequivocal.
    “Nothing happening down there means anything to you.”
    “No.”
    “What happens here on your mountain is the only thing you care about.”
    “Yes,” Kane agreed, but he was looking at Tal suspiciously; he had learned to recognize when he was being led by the too-clever man. “Why?”
    Tal shrugged. “No reason,” was what he said. But Kane distinctly heard You’ll find out. He stared at the unlikely man who had become, even more unlikely, his friend. He supposed he had to admit that. Tal was not merely not an enemy, somewhere along the way he had indeed become a friend.
    But Tal’s barely disguised smile did little to reassure him. In fact, it made him more edgy than he already was.
    So edgy that when he heard the rustling sound behind him, he whirled and reached for a sword he’d quit carrying years ago. And straightened up as the maker of the sound staggered out of the dark and collapsed at his feet. He stared down at the woman crumpled in the dirt, strands of fiery hair escaping from the cloth that tied it back.
    “Damnation,” he muttered. “Who are you?”
    He looked over his shoulder at Tal.
    He was gone.
    But Kane could swear he heard laughter from out of the darkness.

Chapter 2
    JENNA SNUGGLED deeper into the warmth, seeking to pull the sweet tendrils of sleep back around her. The movement sent pain shooting up from her right ankle to her knee, and she came sharply awake. Her involuntary recoil from the pain in her leg caused another sharp jab of pain in her left shoulder. Her breath caught, and she stifled a moan.
    “You’ll regret it less if you stay still.”
    Her head whipped around and she sat up, her eyes searching the shadows for the source of the deep, rough voice. She did cry out then at the sharp pain that seemed to stab from both her leg and her shoulder.
    “As you will, then,” the voice said.
    Instinctively she pulled the roughly woven, heavy cloth blanket closer around her. Vaguely she realized the ankle she had twisted had been bound, and that some sort of balm had been smoothed over her bruised shoulder, but her attention was fixed elsewhere. She stared at the man who sat beside her, illuminated only by the single tallow light that sat on a short, wide, upended log apparently serving as a table.
    Kane.
    There could be little doubt. He was as the legends described him, tall and broad and strong, a long mane of hair as dark as night, cold eyes of an odd, smoky gray. In only one way did the legends lie; they’d called his countenance menacing, frightful, said that his face was twisted into ugliness by a wicked scar. The scar was there, but it was as neat and tidy a mark as she’d ever seen, given what must have been the viciousness of the wound that had caused it. And she found his face not in the least ugly.