Read Gallow for Free Online Page B

do just that, as long as he did it outside.
    Gallow shook his head. ‘Don’t be stupid, old man. You’ll be lucky if you get to the edge of the village.’
    Arda folded her arms. ‘You heard him. He doesn’t even
want
to stay. So, we’re all done here now and he can go.’
    She watched as the man she’d married took a deep breath. He sat back and looked at her at last. Properly, eye to eye like he should have done in the first place. ‘Wife, he’s a soldier! I found him like this after the battle, beside his horse. I could hardly leave him to die.’
    ‘He’s a forkbeard! And we’ve got children to feed.’ She spat on the straw at the wounded man’s feet.
    ‘You mean I should have taken his horse and come back on my own?’ His eyes narrowed and grew suddenly cold. ‘I’m a forkbeard too, or had you forgotten?’
    He had what she thought of as his fighting face on now, the one where he stopped listening. She didn’t care. She’d been looking for a fight from the moment Vennic had come running into the village. ‘Forgotten? Tch!’ She might have thrown something at him, but at that moment the forkbeard’s head slumped onto his chest and his eyes slowly closed. Arda peered at him. ‘So is he dead now?’
    ‘No.’
    ‘Pity. Why are you back here so soon?’ She winced at the anger in her own voice. Not anger that he was back, far from it, but at the way he’d come, at the fright he’d given her. At . . . at . . . She looked at the furs where the two of them lay together at night, at the battered old forkbeard lying there instead. ‘Is it over then?’
    Gallow’s face fell. He shook his head. ‘We broke and ran. The Vathen will come.’
    A thrill ran through her along with the inevitable dread of war.
Forkbeards, beaten!
‘So much for your great Widowmaker then.’ She spat out his name. ‘Murdering bastard. I hope the Vathen slaughtered him.’
    Gallow glanced at the wounded man. He was asleep now. ‘Where are the children?’
    ‘Where do you think? Nadric took them into the hills.’ Her grip on the knife eased. A part of her would always hate Gallow simply for being from across the sea, but she’d dealt with that part and told it to shut up often enough to know how. It was better to have him than not, that was the long and the short of it. Better that he was back than dead. ‘You’re such a thistlefinger! The Vathen are coming? What if they come here? What if they find
that
?’ She pointed at the forkbeard again. ‘Do you
want
to see your children killed in front of you?’
    His eyes flashed. The children were the chink in his armour, but they were the chink in hers too. Made him hard to hate even on her bad days. ‘The Vathen won’t come this way,’ he said.
    She stuck her chin out at him. ‘Did you stop to ask while you were busy running away from them, then?’
    ‘They’ve gone to Fedderhun.’
    ‘Really? Vennic was in the Shepherd’s Tree.
He
said there were riders coming. That’s why we left. You forkbeards taught us that.’
    Gallow cocked his head at her. ‘But
you
didn’t leave.’ She caught a smile flicker across his face and frowned even more deeply. Later, when they were making up again, he’d tell her how he liked her spirit. How it reminded him of home. Every time he said that she punched him. Hard, but he kept on saying it anyway. She pointed her knife at the sleeping forkbeard. ‘I don’t want him here.’
    ‘He’ll go when he can ride again.’
    She threw back her head in disbelief. ‘You’re going to let him keep his horse?’
    ‘It’s
his
horse.’
    Arda threw the knife she was holding hard into the floor in disgust. It struck the wood and stuck, quivering. Right there was the thing between them that would never go away. Family first. ‘You cloth-mouthed scarecrow! There’s four children to be fed here. Hungry ones, and it won’t be the Vathen that feed them. Soldiers only take, whoever they follow.’ She’d lived it once. Never again. ‘You’d