Read The White Mare: The Dalraida Trilogy, Book One for Free Online Page B

Gelert’s gaze. He smelled her fear, she knew it. She returned his look coolly, but her only answer was the glint from the mask’s eye slits, under a fringe of ochredyed mane.
    When Linnet had laid down the King’s spear, Gelert took up a flaming torch, calling to Lugh of the Shining Spear to light the way to the Blessed Isles. Sparks drifted out over the water, and as the first fingers of sunlight at last spilled over the hills, Gelert bent and lit the pyre beneath the King’s body.
    Flames leaped into the air with a roar, fed by the pitch that soaked the nine sacred woods, and in answer to the hungry tongues of fire, the women’s wailing broke out again, and the harps and pipes skirled into life. Warriors beat their swords on their hide shields, drowning out the druid drums.
    With a wave, Gelert signalled to the curraghs that were roped to the King’s boat in the shallows. The oarsmen rowed hard, and the ropes grew taut as they drew the boat offshore.
    Rhiann’s gaze was fixed on the smoke, unseeing. The King was gone .
    Desperate, she wanted to reach out and pull the boat back, have him sit up again, laugh again, bellow again. He was gone .
    The curraghs cut the ropes and came racing back to shore, and the blazing boat was soon no more than a speck on the water, obscured by smoke. Dread swept over Rhiann then, and with it came a fevered vision of a man, her unknown husband, laying on her, smothering her with his rank beard, stinking of meat and sweat and ale … She swayed in horror. How could she ever face such an attack, night after night, for the rest of her life? She would not be able to bear it.
    I won’t , she thought fiercely. I’ll give them what they want and then I’ll leave. Or die!
    And then, something happened to sweep these bleak thoughts away in one shocking flash of light. Something … impossible.
    A flare of crimson and gold blazed for a heartbeat, cleaving the smoke. Rhiann shaded her eyes. Then the breeze cleared the haze for one brief moment and – there – the flash came again, so brilliant and sharp it hurt. Goddess, what was it?
    Abruptly, the singing and wailing died away, and Declan, the seer thrust his way to Gelert’s side. People were peering out to sea, open-mouthed. The shocked silence lasted only a moment, and then a rustling of whispers began to hiss like foam over the sand. When the flash came a third time, the rustling swelled to a fearful murmur. Time was caught, suspended on the cold dawn wind.
    But death was all around this day, and fear and tension were running high. And so the first cry of terror at last spilled over. ‘The sun rises again in the west! The gods have come!’
    ‘An omen!’ someone else screamed.
    The panic instantly caught alight, blazing through the crowd as a spark lit to dry tinder.
    ‘The gods are angry!’ a young woman wailed. ‘Oh, mercy, save us!’
    Warriors were wrenching spears from their shield-bearers and unsheathing swords, unsure whether they faced a threat from Thisworld or the Otherworld. Talorc, bellowing orders, got the men into a wavering line facing the sea, and the druids clustered closer around Gelert and Declan. But when Rhiann felt Linnet grip her hand, and saw her aunt close her eyes in the seeing way, she did the same, her senses yearning towards the strange light. Please, Mother, just this once, let me see!
    She held her breath … and then a swirling picture flared into life in her mind. The spirit-eye on her brow blazed with pain, and she gasped, trying to hold the scene steady. As she did, the gasp lurched into a cry of shock. For what faced them was not, as the people feared, an Otherworld sun. It was something much, much worse: sunlightreflecting off weapons and mailshirts. A boat full of warriors, shining from head to foot, with the glint of swords in their hands.
    As she registered this, terror coursed through Rhiann’s veins in a bright flood, so intense that she caught her breath. Raiders! How could I let them get