BURY ME DEEP an utterly gripping crime thriller with an epic twist (Detective Rozlyn Priest Book 1) by JANE ADAMS (best book reader .txt) 📗

thoughts strayed to that last battle. The one that had finally turned the tide against Guthrum and had, eventually, brought him to this place. This place he had already begun to think of as home.

The night before they fought he had dreamed the battle at Eddington. Perhaps it was the memory of so many skirmishes, so many death fights that caused him to see so clearly, but whatever the cause, Treven knew even before waking how the day would go.

The previous night they had left their stronghold and travelled by flat boat across the marshes. Then the forced march through ankle-deep mire, the stink of rotting vegetation choking as they disturbed the stagnant water.

“They’ll smell us coming,” Hugh had whispered. “We will not need to fight, the stench will choke the air from their lungs even before we begin.”

They had halted an hour or so before dawn. Treven, standing blind in the deep shadows of their encampment, ears straining to catch the night sounds, had heard but not seen the arrival of the others. Men summoned from their fields, from their boats, from their hiding places. Treven himself had gone out as messenger in the days before, calling to the broken stone cross all those who still held to Aelfred’s cause. Praying, even as he spread the word, that those who heard it would come faithfully, praying even harder that they would not betray their king, not at this late time.

Aelfred had been king of very little on that day. He could claim ownership of only a short stretch of land that had once housed a hunting lodge and been a playground for he and his elder brothers in time of peace. If they had failed on that day, Treven knew that there would be no hope of regrouping. The line of Aelfred’s kin would be finished and men like Treven good as dead.

A woman’s voice, very soft but clear on the cold air reminded him of his duties should they fail. Aelfred’s children would wait here, beside this once holy place and, should their father fail, then Treven and Hugh and a trusted handful of others would have been responsible for ensuring their escape.

If they survived,

If they could make their way back here.

If . . .

The night before that final battle Treven had fallen into an uneasy sleep with those thoughts on his mind but when he had roused a scant two hours later, he had woken with a sense of certainty.

They would succeed. He knew it. Guthrum would fail and Aelfred win out against him.

Treven had dreamed of the half-blind god. Seen him as he strode across the land of Treven’s birth, his twin ravens flying high above his head and crying back the news to their master’s ears and, as Treven watched, half afraid that Wotan would see him, half afraid that he would not, he heard the sound of a horn and, suddenly, as it often is in dreams, the scene was changed and Wotan no longer walked. He rode astride a powerful, coal-black horse. His battle axe was raised as he charged full pelt across the field of battle and behind him streamed the hunt, gathering the souls of the fallen as the blood soaked and seeped into the land.

“What do you see?” Hugh had asked him softly.

“See?”

“Since we broke camp, your eyes have been everywhere but on the path we walk. What do you see, Treven?”

Treven had shrugged but glanced again at the line of trees that ran parallel to the track they were taking. He had been aware of them since waking, those others that recalled the nature of his dream. The movement, caught out of the tail of his eye, gone when he looked direct. The soft sound of leather against leather, metal catching against metal, shield scraping against shield and the shush of drawn sword and the creaking of tired bones. Could he hear all of that?

Treven looked back at Hugh. “I see nothing,” he said.

“But,” Hugh persisted. “You sense something?”

Treven could see the unease, the questioning in his friend’s eyes. This otherness of Treven disturbed and troubled him.

“Sometimes,” Hugh said, as lightly as he could, “I think you have more kinship with the spirits and magic of our enemy than that of Christ.”

Treven made no reply. He glanced back at the line of trees. Friend or enemy, he wondered, then knew the question to be a worthless, meaningless one. The ones who marched and watched and sometimes ran beside them, half seen, half felt beneath the trees no longer troubled themselves with the rights and wrongs of men, they just were. They waited, they watched, they gathered the dead, trampled the blood-soaked earth beneath their booted feet, but left no track or sign that a living man could follow.

Treven had shuddered and caught the fear and alarm in Hugh’s eyes. “This day will go well for us,” he had said. “On that score, you should have no fear.”

Hugh had relaxed, his shoulders losing their tension and his eyes became less troubled. Treven shifted his attention to the road ahead. What was it he was seeing? What was it that had caused him to see? Sometimes he thought that Hugh must indeed be right. He had been baptised into the religion his father served, but at times the faith and beliefs of his pagan mother seemed more fiercely burned into his soul.

Now, sitting beside his own Hall, the land that was now in his care stretching out in all directions, Treven breathed deep of the cool, fragrant air and gave thanks. This would be home, this was where he would begin again and, he promised himself, none would stand in the way of that.

CHAPTER 12

Rozlyn drew a blank with the first contact, Mr Ed Foulks being away for the summer according to his housekeeper. She seemed