BURY ME DEEP an utterly gripping crime thriller with an epic twist (Detective Rozlyn Priest Book 1) JANE ADAMS (fox in socks read aloud TXT) 📖

It was crudely engraved with the image of a hanging man, his arms outstretched but uplifted and fastened to the arms of a cross. He was clothed like a warrior, a sword hanging from his side and a shield lying beneath his feet. A spear was being thrust by a second warrior to pierce just below his heart. The spear had been reddened with ochre, as had wounds on his hands and feet. But for that, Treven would have thought that it depicted Odin suffering for knowledge on the world tree, a thought borne out by the fact that the hanging figure only possessed a single eye. Wotan, All Father, had given an eye to Mimir in exchange for wisdom.

A loose and crudely wrought pattern of threads and knots decorated the cross’s wheel and beneath the feet of the spear carrier stood an arc-backed boar, head down as though ready for the charge.

At the foot of the cross lay an offering of flowers and berries. Placed recently, Treven thought, for the fruit had not spoiled, despite the unexpected heat of the autumn sun. But beside that, its wings outstretched and pegged firmly to the hard-baked ground, lay a large black crow.

He had the strongest feeling, looking at the position of the creature, that it had been living when someone pinned it there. Blood on the ground gave testimony to its struggles and Treven was oddly sickened by it, almost more than by the nauseous odour emanating from the second thing that stood upon the rise.

He was not afraid of either death or the sight of it. He had seen too many fall, then pecked by battle scavengers and flesh bitten and wrenched by the carrion eaters, for death to evoke feelings other than that of pity and, when he could spare time for it, of loss. He had lived too long by the sword to have any doubt that one day he would die that way and had long since discovered that a man cannot live forever fearful. Dread is a life-destroying, strength-sapping emotion and cannot be sustained by those who are tired and hungry and exist in anticipation of the next sword blow, the next clash of shields. So it was not the sight of the hanging tree or what was left of a man after the crows had taken their fill that brought such a feeling of wrongness into Treven’s thoughts. Rather it was something about the positioning of the cross and the gibbet, and the man and the great black bird. The corpse stank, poisoning the air, the stench settling in the sheltered stillness of a pathway trapped between rising land on either side. The corpse’s belly swelled fit to burst with the rot and putrefaction the bag of skin contained. Maggots writhed beneath the muscles of his face as though they sought to create some last vestige of human expression before they spilled from the tongue-choked, partly opened mouth.

The sight and scent made their horses skittish, battle-trained beasts though they were and well used to the caustic stink of death. Their unease added to Treven’s sense of wrongness, to his fleeting but insistent impression that there was something evil here, beyond what his eye could see, or which choked the breath from him. But what it was he could not say, only recall that he had felt this way before and that the consequences of such a feeling had not been good.

“Some rule of law exists here still,” Hugh commented wryly, jerking Treven from his reverie.

“It would seem so. Though I would wish to know if the man’s crime had been great enough to be deserving of death, or if it were only that he lacked wealth to pay the wergild.”

“Or had not been strung up by some thief after the contents of his purse,” Hugh shrugged. “To know that, you must ask the steward and the tythingmen.”

“If such men still exist here.” Treven paused a moment longer, half inclined to give the order to his servants to cut the man down. He disliked this practice of leaving the corpse to hang, as though death were not sufficient punishment. And in these days when the shire courts were so often bypassed and common law gave way to the wishes of the mob, it was not so strange to see the freshly dead strung up beside those whose flesh dropped from the bones.

These were brutal times, Treven thought. Though truthfully neither he nor his father or his grandsire could have recalled a place in memory when times had not been brutal. War and death seemed to cry out for more death until the ways of justice seemed often to be forgotten and swift vengeance the only thing that mattered. Treven gestured towards the cross. “The bird,” he said. “Release it.” Then as an afterthought, one that seemed to come from another’s wishes and not his own, “Burn it.”

“And then what, sir?”

Treven sighed, the impulse, the other voice having fled his mind as swiftly as it had come. He gestured impatiently at his servant. “Whatever seems fit to do,” he said, then wheeled his horse and rode on, aware of the look his servants and even Hugh exchanged as he passed them by.

* * *

Treven had been told that his hall at Theadingford was some two miles from the village of Theading and that his new home was in need of some repair. However Treven’s first sight of the ramshackle building brought to mind a saying of his grandfather’s. “Beware the gifts of kings,” the old man would say. “More often than not, they turn and bite.”

“In times of war,” Hugh observed, “I expect to sleep where sleep finds me. But when my old friend promises me a bed in his house, I expect there at least to be a house.”

“There is a house . . . of sorts,” Treven