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“The other brother?”
“Ryan Cawdor. Fifteen when he disappeared. Word was of an attempt on his life. That left him… Swift and vengeful boy, they say. Some think him rotting in the moat, like many another. But a lot of honest folks still think that one day he’ll come riding in from the west on a stallion of pure white. He’ll slaughter the Cawdors, take back the ville and the sunshine days will come again to all in the Shens. What d’you think of that, Mas-ter.. .Thursby?”
This time the hesitation was plain.
“What do you think ab out this missing brother, Mas-ter. . .Freeman?” Ryan dragged the pause out even longer.
“I think that I believe some things and not others. You know?”
“What?”
“I believe he escaped. I believe he lives. I don’t believe in the dreck about a white stallion or a blaster that fires golden ammo. No!”
“I heard a tale, Master Freeman.”
“Tell me.” The young man picked up a handful of dried cones from a nearby pine tree and flicked them un-derhanded into the water, staring after them as they bobbed and leaped through the shallows and falls of the narrow river. He kept his face turned away from Ryan.
“Morgan Cawdor, they say, had a woman, and the woman bore a child after the death of her husband. Mur-dered, we agree, by Harvey. A son, I heard. The mother was mutie.”
“She was…” the young man began, pale face flush-ing, dark eyes glaring. He threw the rest of the cones into the water with a barely controlled viciousness.
“She was what? I heard she was a woman with the power of seeing. If there had been a son, could he have
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inherited that?” He waited a moment, then answered his own question. “Perhaps.”
“They say that Ryan Cawdor was desperate wounded when he fled the ville.”
“Do they?”
“They say that a blade from Harvey’s fist took out an eye, neat as a stone from a ripe plum-so they say-and opened a cut that ran from eye to mouth along the right side of the boy’s cheek.”
Then he turned and looked straight into Ryan’s good eye, a fierce intensity in his glittering black eyes.
Neither man spoke for several heart-stopping seconds.
The moment broke into shards of crystal time as a voice wafted to them from the trail that led to the village.
“Nate? You there?”
“Yeah.”
“Seen Tom?”
“No. Saw him late last night. Not this morning. Why d’you…?”
“Missing. Horse gone an’ all.”
Ryan felt the short hairs rising on the back of his neck- the familiar warning of imminent danger. Sitting close to the young man, he was aware of Nathan’s whole body tensing and stiffening. His mouth hung open, and the breath hissed through the man’s teeth.
“We’ve-”
“I heard it,” Ryan interrupted.
“The horse? The bastard’s gone to the ville.”
There was a cold horror in Nathan’s voice and blank, shocked face.
“Couple of hours after midnight. Listened. Didn’t hear anything more.”
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Freeman stood up, uncoiling with an easy grace. “You heard it! By all the gods, Ryan! Didn’t you feel it? Didn’t you see it!”
Ryan also stood, hardly noticing in the sudden, dread-ful tension that Nathan had admitted he was indeed part rnutie. And he had called him “Ryan.” He knew him.
And, in turn, Ryan realized his own guess was correct. He knew who Nathan Freeman was!
“Morgan’s son,” he said softly. “You’re the son of my brother. Your mother was Guenema. I’m your uncle, lad.”
“Hell,” Nate said. “I guess I knew that all along, Uncle Ryan.” His expression changed. “But now’s not the time. Gotta move, and fast.”
“We been betrayed?”
“Tom. Wants to be sec chief of Shersville. Guess he’ll get his way now.” The words tumbled over one another in the young man’s haste to explain.
“When will they come, Nate?”
The water was covering their conversation from the villager standing a few paces behind them.
“They’re here.”
“What? Fireblast! We have-”
Nathan Freeman laid a hand on his arm. “Too late. Now I’m concentrating I can hear ’em. Load of sec men, on all sides. They’ll take you, even in a firefight. Listen, I can make it through the woods. Get to the old man and the straw-head girl. To your wag. Other blasters there?”