Spook's: The Dark Army (The Starblade Chronicles) Read Free

Grimalkin pushed me away.
    ‘Leave him, child! He needs to sleep deeply,’ she commanded, giving me a glimpse of her pointy teeth. She seemed concerned, but angry too. Being a seventh daughter of a seventh daughter, one of my gifts is that of empathy – but it didn’t work with the witch assassin. Perhaps she had magical barriers in place.
    Soon Prince Stanislaw, escorted by four guards, came to see Tom; he had a brief animated conversation with Grimalkin in the local language, Losta; she didn’t bother to translate for me so I don’t know exactly what was said – though sometimes I can read people’s thoughts, and the prince’s mind was open to me. He was excited and astonished and filled with rapture, believing that he had witnessed a miracle. He was happy for Tom too; happy that he still lived, and fervently wished for a full recovery. But beneath all these thoughts was calculation: already he was anticipating using Tom as a figurehead to rally more troops and launch an attack upon the Kobalos.
    After the departure of the prince we were left alone in the tent. Grimalkin sat beside Tom, staring down into his face while I paced back and forth in agitation, my mind racing with what I had seen. I longed to ask Grimalkin how he was doing, but her expression was forbidding. At last I blurted out my question.
    ‘Will he get better?’ I asked. ‘Is it possible?’
    ‘Come here, child,’ Grimalkin told me. ‘Look at this . . .’
    I approached the low trestle table where Tom lay. She pulled back the sheet and pointed to the place where the Kobalos’s sabre had transfixed his body. I had seen scales around Tom’s wound before, but now it had closed right up, sealed with scales.
    ‘It’s a miracle!’ I exclaimed. ‘The angel has restored him to life!’
    Grimalkin shook her head, looking nothing like her usual confident self. ‘It was not a miracle and that creature was no angel. In part, the healing came about because of the lamia blood that courses through his veins – something that he inherited from his mother. But he was certainly dead, and restoring him to life required a dark magic so powerful that everyone who witnessed it should be afraid.’
    Lamia witches were shape-shifters. In their ‘domestic’ form they had the appearance of human women but for the line of green and yellow scales that ran the length of their spines. In their ‘feral’ shape they scuttled around on all fours with sharp teeth and talons, crunching bones and drinking the blood of their victims.
    I knew that Tom’s mam had been a healer and a midwife but to my astonishment Grimalkin had revealed that she had also been a lamia. She had passed on to Tom the ability to heal himself. But surviving death was something far beyond that.
    ‘Who used the magic?’ I asked.
    Grimalkin didn’t answer. Was she even listening to me? I wondered. She seemed to have retreated into her own private world. I heard a murmuring outside, and rather than repeating my question I went over and lifted the tent flap. Scores of warriors stood outside, staring at the tent.
    I returned to Tom’s makeshift bed. He was breathing slowly, in a deep sleep, but looked as if he might open his eyes at any moment. I wondered fearfully if he could really be himself after such a trauma? He might have been tipped into insanity or have no recollection of his former life.
    ‘There are ranks of warriors outside. What do they want?’ I asked Grimalkin.
    She sighed, drew back the blanket and inspected Tom’s wound again. She spoke so quietly that I had to lean closer to catch her words. ‘They want this sleeping “prince” to lead them across the river and destroy the Kobalos. They have seen Tom defeat the Shaiksa; now they have witnessed his return from the dead, an even greater accomplishment. They want what I wanted. We have reached the position I hoped for all along. But someone else has brought us to this point; someone who had already planted the seeds of