‘What do you want?’ he snorted and drank some more wine. If he finished it quickly enough, he might be able to persuade this strange woman to buy him another jug.
She laughed her bright laugh again and shook her head gently. ‘The question isn’t what do I want, but rather, what do you want’, she said, correcting him. There was something in her question that reawakened pictures in his head, which he would prefer buried, and he threw his jug to the floor, causing it to smash. ‘I want more wine!’ he shouted at her, but the strange creature seemed completely unruffled by his behaviour, her smile permanently chiselled, like a mask that would never leave her, no matter what the bearer was doing.
‘I mean, what do you really want?’ she whispered urgently into his ear, and he doubled over gasping as the images overwhelmed him, the ones he had drowned so carefully in alcohol over all those months.
‘Revenge’, growled Sven and stared at her, his face contorted with rage, his nose and left eye both festering ruins. ‘I want revenge.’
The woman laid her hand on his forearm and leaned her face with its frozen smile in towards him. She took a golden book from her lap and placed it on the table before him.
See how Ahren’s adventures continue:
The Thirteenth Paladin, volume IV
“The Sleeping Mother”
Sam Feuerbach:
The first volume in Sam Feuerbach’s best-selling saga, winner of the German Fantasy Prize 2018 for best Audio Book.
More than 14.000 enthusiastic reviews (Amazon/Audible)
High Fantasy Middle Ages Series in four volumes
Farin, the gravedigger’s son, lives in the medieval village of Heap. The eighteen-year-old is an outsider, bullied and ostracised by the villagers. His father has succumbed to a life of drinking, and so the young man has no option but to take over the job of gravedigger. Farin’s life takes a dramatic twist when the village witch dies and he prepares her for burial. He finds an amulet hanging around the deceased preparer of poisons neck. And he can’t resist trying the trinket on...