Servant: The Dark God Book 1 Read Free Page B

They’d fill her or Fancy full of arrows before she’d galloped a rod.
    “Do you hear me?” asked Mother.
    “Yes,” Sugar said.
    She looked past Da at the soldiers out front. They’d stopped a number of paces beyond him. Those with bows had strung them, and that was something fearful because keeping a bow strung all the time only ruined the bow. You never strung your bow unless you were going to use it.
    Midnight and Sky barked at the men until Da whistled sharply and called them back to his side.
    Two men on horseback rode to the front of the line and faced Da. The leader with the orange and blue patterns painted onto his armor was the Territory Lord, a man everyone called The Crab for his ruddy complexion. Next to him sat the District Lord. Behind them stood Barg, the butcher and harvest master of the village, holding his spear.
    Da bowed to The Crab. “My lord,” he said with a grin. “Have you at last come to wrestle your humble servant?”
    The Crab did not smile in return. “Sparrow, smith of Plum,” he said. “You have been accused of dark magic. We are here to take you and yours to prove that you are whole and without spot.”
    Dark magic? Sugar did not believe she’d heard him correctly.
    “What?” said Da.
    “If you’re clean,” said The Crab, “you need not fear the ordeal.”
    An ordeal was designed to flush out sleth. Supposedly, when such a creature was on the point of death or overwhelming pain, through drowning or torture, it would multiply its strength with its dark magic to save itself and thus reveal its true nature.
    But how anyone could think her family was among such was impossible to fathom. Sleth were those who had given themselves over to Regret, the one Creator of seven who, when he’d seen what the seven of them had wrought, recognized that it was flawed and despised the work of his hands. To those who came into his twisted power, he gave horrible gifts—unnatural strength and appetites, odd growths and manifestations of beasts, and the power, with a touch, to steal Fire and Soul. The stories of sleth, and the hunts the righteous led against them, were legion.
    The Crab reached into a pouch tied to the front of his saddle and pulled out a thin collar, almost a necklace.
    “I have here a King’s Collar. I want you to put it on.” He tossed it. The collar shimmered in the early morning light, and then landed in the dust two-thirds of the way between The Crab and Da. “When it’s about your neck, you will bind your wife and children in chains.”
    He motioned to a man behind him who brought up a number of leg and neck irons and tossed them to join the collar.
    A King’s Collar was a magical thing, wrought by a special order of Divines called Kains; it not only prevented a person from working magic, but it weakened them and made them easy to handle.
    Sugar realized the men did not come closer and bind the family themselves because they feared some kind of evil trick.
    “This is ridiculous,” said Da.
    The Crab’s horse danced to the side a few steps.
    Then the District Lord tossed a large sack toward Da. It landed heavily on the ground. “The contents of that sack were found last evening on the banks of the Green by a group of mothers and children doing their laundry. Open it.”
    Da walked over to the sack, squatted down, and pulled the mouth open.
    “Whose child is that in the sack, Master Sparrow?”
    Mother took in a sharp breath.
    Da hesitated for a moment, then gently worked the body out. He knelt there for quite some time, not moving, not saying a word.
    Then Sugar knew who was in that sack. She could feel it from the crown of her head to her toes. Her fear fled and she raced out the door.
    Da turned and motioned for her to stay. “Get back!”
    But it was too late. Sugar saw the baby that Da had exposed.
    It was Cotton, her little brother. Little Cotton, stolen out of his crib earlier this spring. By woodikin or slavers or wild dogs, nobody knew. Yet here he