Read (Shadowmarch #1) Shadowmarch for Free Online

like a stone from the mouth of a culverin and knocked him onto his back.
    Chert tried to shout, but the thing had his neck gripped in clammy hands and was trying to bite his chest through his thick jerkin. He was so busy fighting for his life that he couldn’t even make out the shape of his attacker until a third body entered the fray and dragged the clutching, strangling monstrosity off him and they all tumbled into a pile.
    “Are you . . . hurt . . . ?” Opal gasped.
    “Where is that thing?” Chert rolled over into a sitting position. The sack’s contents were crouching a short distance away, staring at him with squinting blue eyes. It was a slender-limbed boy, a child of perhaps five or six years, sweaty and disheveled, with deathly pale skin and hair that was almost white, as though he had been inside the sack for years.
    Opal sat up. “A child! I told you.” She looked at the boy for a moment. “One of the big folk, poor thing.”
    “Poor thing, indeed!” Chert gently touched the scraped places on his neck and cheeks. “The little beast tried to murder me.”
    “Oh, be still. You startled him, that’s all.” She held out her hand toward the boy. “Come here—I won’t hurt you. What’s your name, child?” When the boy did not reply, she fumbled in the wide pockets of her dress and withdrew a heel of brown bread. “Are you hungry?”
    From the fierce glint in his eye, the boy was clearly very interested, but he still did not move toward her. Opal leaned forward and set the bread on the grass. He looked at it and her, then snatched the bread up, sniffed it, and crammed it into his mouth, scarcely bothering to chew before swallowing. Finished, the boy looked at Opal with fierce expectancy. She laughed in a worried way and felt in her pocket until she located a few pieces of dried fruit, which she also set on the grass. They disappeared even faster than the bread.
    “What’s your name?” she asked the boy. “Where are you from?”
    Searching his teeth with his tongue for any fragments of food that might have escaped him, he only looked at her.
    “Dumb, it seems,” said Chert. “Or at least he doesn’t speak our . . .”
    “Where is this?” the boy asked.
    “Where . . . what do you mean?” said Chert, startled.
    “Where is this . . . ?” The boy swept his arm in a circle, taking in the trees, the grassy hillside, the fogbound forest. “This . . . place. Where are we?” He sounded older than his age somehow, but younger, too, as though speaking were a new thing to him.
    “We are on the edge of Southmarch—called Shadowmarch by some, because of this Shadowline.” Chert gestured toward the misty boundary, then swung himself around to point in the opposite direction. “The castle is over there.”
    “Shadow . . . line?” The boy squinted. “Castle?”
    “He needs more food.” Opal’s words had the sound of an inarguable decision rendered. “And sleep. You can see he’s nearly falling over.”
    “Which means what?” But Chert already saw the shape of it and did not like it much at all.
    “Which means we take him home, of course.” Opal stood, brushing the loose grass from her dress. “We feed him.”
    “But . . . but he must belong to someone! To one of the big-folk families!”
    “And they tied him in a sack and left him here?” Opal laughed scornfully. “Then they are likely not pining for his return.”
    “But he came . . . he came from . . .” Chert looked at the boy, who was sucking his fingers and examining the landscape. He lowered his voice. “He came from the other side. ”
    “He’s here now,” Opal said. “Look at him. Do you really think he’s some unnatural thing? He’s a little boy who wandered into the twilight and was tossed out again. Surely we, of all people, should know better than to believe everything that has to do with the Shadowline is wicked. Does this mean you plan to throw back the gems you’ve found here, too? No, he probably comes from