The Broken Kings: Book Three of The Merlin Codex Read Free

strange changes in the sanctuaries of the fortress itself should have given me the clues.
    Niiv, the enchantress from the Northlands, daughter of a shaman—bane of my life since I had first encountered her with Jason—had joined the women who guarded the well. Now there were four of them, all young, wild, unkempt, capable of the most astonishing and terrifying shrieks of laughter and amazement, or of horror and despair: all the screams of the “far-seeing and deep-sensing” that make such guardians of the sacred so disarming, so dissociated from the people who live around them.
    Niiv, by this time, had become my lover. She shared my cramped quarters in the fortress, but not my squalid hut in the heart of the evergroves, by the river, a living space among the honoured dead.
    In the early hours of each morning, when she crawled across me, seeking me out for satisfaction, she stank of mysteries. The smell of old earth and sour sap filled our small lodge. We lived close to the guarded orchard where the Speakers for Land, Past, and Kings—the oak men, as they were known—held their ceremonies. Our own ceremonies were noisier. Niiv was primal and eager. Delight glowed from her. There were times when she was brighter than the moon.
    As she scoured my body, her cries of pleasure echoed with recent memory: of the way she had also scoured the world of spirits during her time by the well. When she finally collapsed across me, sighing deeply, the sigh of softening was more to do with her waxing understanding of enchantment than with my own waning presence inside her.
    I loved her; I feared her. She had learned to treat me with just enough disdain to draw me closer. She was aware that I knew what she was doing. It made no difference to either of us. Passion flourishes with teasing.
    *   *   *
    All the signs were that the hill below the fortress of Taurovinda was coming alive in a way that signalled danger from the west, from across the sacred river Nantosuelta—the Winding One—from the otherworldly Realm of the Shadows of Heroes.
    To Urtha, High King of the Cornovidi, and to his Speakers and High Women, the signs were sudden and dramatic: sweeping storm clouds that formed unnatural shapes above the hill before abruptly shattering in all directions; then the thundering of a stampede of cattle, though no cattle were to be seen; other physical manifestations that were frightening and suggestive. But there were subtler marks of the change that was in progress, and I had been aware of them for almost a full cycle of the moon.
    The first phenomenon was the backwards movement of creatures. When a flock of birds is swarming in the dusk sky, it’s easy to see only the shadow movement without noticing that the flock is flying tail-feathers first. Deer seemed to be swallowed by the edge of the woods, pulled back into the green rather than retreating from view. At dawn, as first light cast its faintest glow, the dogs and bigger hounds of Taurovinda all seemed to be cowering, as if at bay, facing some unseen aggressor, walking stiffly, tails first, into the shadows from which they had emerged to scavenge.
    As fast as these moments of disorientation occurred, so they ceased, but there was no doubt in my mind that the past and the future were becoming entangled in a deadly weave.
    Secondly, there was riddle-speaking. Again, it passed as quickly as it had been manifest. A quick greeting, a passing remark by a blacksmith to his apprentice, and the words were meaningless, though spoken meaningfully. To the listening ear they made no sense, a sequence of sounds, guttural gibberish. But the riddle-speakers themselves saw no difficulty. It was as if a forgotten tongue had briefly possessed them. Which indeed it had.
    This was something I knew well.
    As I saw Time begin to play tricks, I looked for its source of entry into the fortress. I went first to the orchard, the grove guarded by Speaker for Kings, tight spinneys of fruit trees, hazel and