Full Circle
Authors: Pamela Freeman
with each step.
The movement unsettled her as nothing in her life had ever done. She had tried to pack them tightly but they shook loose,
as though Acton was determined in death, as he had been in life, not to be trammelled. As though at every step he tapped her
on the back, saying, “Remember me?”
It was bad enough to bear her grief for him; to bear his bones as well, to be a packhorse for his remains, was too much. She
wanted to be rid of them. Wanted fiercely to see him again, even as a ghost, and also wanted fiercely not to see him as a
ghost, pale and insubstantial. She thought it was a good thing the gods were driving her, because if it had been up to her
she was not sure whether she would have brought him back.
But she would complete her task and stop Saker. Kill him, too, if the gods were kind. And then, only then, could she stop
and consider what Obsidian Lake had done to her, and who she might be afterwards.
So if Lady Death tried to stop her, too bad for the Lady.
Praise for
Blood Ties
“With magic, murder, adventure, and mystery,
Blood Ties
is an exciting beginning to a brand-new fantasy epic.” —
scifichick.com
Y
P
AMELA
F
REEMAN
The Castings Trilogy
Blood Ties
Deep Water
Full Circle
Copyright © 2009 by Pamela Freeman
Excerpt from
Hand of Isis
copyright © 2009 by Jo Wyrick
All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
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First eBook Edition: November 2009
Orbit is an imprint of Hachette Book Group, Inc. The Orbit name and logo are trademarks of Little, Brown Book Group Limited.
The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
ISBN: 978-0-316-07194-9
To Stephen and Robert
I
’
M SENDING
a rope down!” Medric said. “There’s nothing to hitch it to here, so don’t pull on it until I’m braced and I give you the
word.”
“All right,” said Bramble. She was lucky, she supposed, that she had come down into the caves with Medric, an experienced
miner, but part of her wished he would let her stay down here at the bottom of this shaft, alone in the middle of a mountain
with Acton’s bones, until she too had died and her flesh had sifted into dust.
“Ready?” Medric called.
Bramble adjusted the rope under her armpits and clasped her arms around the fragile bundle of Acton’s bones. She pushed down
all feeling. She didn’t have time for grief, or love, or anything but revenge. Saker the enchanter was going to come to grief
himself, and she would be there to destroy him. For her sister Maryrose. For all the innocents killed by Saker’s ghost army.
“Ready,” she said.
“Now!”
She began to climb, bracing herself against the shaft wall with her feet as Medric hauled from above. The rope cut her, but
she was making steady progress when Medric yelled something from above and the world came tumbling down.
Dirt and small rocks hit her face first, blinding her, and then Medric’s heavy body slid down the shaft, slamming them both
to the ground, with rubble and pebbles cascading after them, covering the candle stub and plunging them into darkness.
They lay gasping for a long moment before Bramble could move.
“Everlasting dark!” Medric swore, his voice shaky. “The edge just gave way.”
Somehow, it made Bramble grin. Gods and powers, delvers and hunters from the Great Forest, all had conspired to get her here
to find these bones, and now a simple accident could undo it all. She rather liked that, liked the feeling of being, for the
moment, free from destiny and instruction. No one had foreseen this, as far as she knew. That meant she could react as she
liked and do as she pleased in response.
So she laughed.
“Bramble!” Medric reproved, much as her mother used to.
“Well, it could have been worse,” she said. “You’re not really hurt, are you?”
She sat up and felt both the jacket full of bones and herself for injuries. Scrapes, bruises (gods, lots of bruises!), and
a swelling above one ear — although it seemed very large for something that had just happened, so it may have been a legacy
from her first fall down the shaft.
Medric searched around in the rubble until he found the tinderbox, then fished a spare candle out of his belt pouch and lit
it. She
was
lucky that Medric had proved so steadfast. She wouldn’t have blamed him if he had run away when the delvers came and pushed
her down this shaft.
“Always carry a few,” he said, although earlier he had intimated that they would run out of light if they didn’t turn back
soon. He really didn’t like being underground, Bramble thought, with a flicker of worry. They weren’t likely to get out of
here anytime soon.
“Will your friend go for help?”
“Fursey?” Medric shook his head, sending dust flying out of his hair like gold in the candlelight. “He left after the delvers
came. Doesn’t even know we’re down here.” His voice was dark with abandonment; he’d hoped that Fursey would stay with him,
Bramble thought.
She ignored his sigh; they didn’t have time to worry about love affairs gone wrong, no matter how strange the beloved or how
deep the hurt. “So we’ll have to find another way out.”
“I might be able to climb out,” Medric said doubtfully, but when they examined the shaft they found it was clogged with rubble,
and with her saddlebags, which had slid down the shaft with Medric. Bramble dislodged them, sending gravel spinning off, and
emptied out everything in them: spare clothes, hairbrush, boot ties, rags, salt were all moved to one bag, leaving the other
empty, ready. Almost empty. At the bottom, where she had put it before leaving Gorham’s farm, months ago, was the red scarf
she had won when she became the Kill Reborn. It was the only colour in this dark world, and she let it stay where it was,
not sure if she were being sentimental or prudent. It was tangled with the brooch Ash had given her. She had tucked it in
there when they left Obsidian Lake.
She left the brooch and scarf and put Acton’s bones in on top of them. The leg bones didn’t fit, and she had to suppress a
feeling of panic that she had to leave them behind. She placed them carefully on a low rock, feeling both solemn and silly;
they looked ridiculous, like pickings from a giant’s plate, but they were Acton’s, and she couldn’t just throw them away.
Medric tried pulling a few rocks out from the shaft, but more just shifted down into their place. “There’s been a big rockfall,”
he said, in a far more confident tone, the voice of the miner. “No getting out that way, not without a gang of men working
from above.”
“So,” Bramble said, turning and staring into the dark. “We go exploring.”
They were standing under a low roof in a flat-bottomed area which sloped gently down to their left and rose more steeply to
their right, where the roof became too low for them to walk. There was only one way to go.
“Just as well it’s heading the right way,” Bramble said.
“Everything gets turned around underground,” Medric said warningly. “Don’t depend on your sense of direction down here.”
“But —” Bramble always knew where she was, and that sense seemed to be working fine. She pointed down the slope and slightly
to the right. “The mine entrance is that way.”
Medric looked sceptical. “No choice either way,” he said. “We follow the river bed.”
“What?”
“This would have been a river course, one time,” he explained as he led the way down, candle held high. “That’s why the walls
are so smooth.”
Bramble hitched Acton’s bones over her shoulder more comfortably, and reached out to touch the wall with the other hand. It
was smoother than she’d expected. “So if we follow it down, we find water?” she suggested.
“If we’re lucky. If it doesn’t narrow too much, or if there’s been no rockfalls, or if the land hasn’t shifted since the river
flowed — which it probably has, which is why the course is dry now.” He turned to look seriously at her, his hazel eyes reflecting
the spark of candlelight. “We’ll be lucky if we get out alive.”
Bramble smiled. At least this was
real
— not god-given dreams or time shifting beneath her feet. And it distracted her from thoughts of Acton, which she wasn’t
ready to face. She thumped Medric on the shoulder and saw him wince as she hit a bruise. “I’m hard to kill,” she said. “Let’s
go.”
