Read Online A Knot in the Grain by Robin McKinley - Free Book Online

door high and wide enough even for his branching crown. Still she kept pace, and before her was a vast chamber, dimly lit by a fire in a hearth at its far end. There were several tall chairs before the fire, and from the shadows of one of them a tall narrow man with pale hair stood up and came toward them. “Welcome, child,” he said to her; and to him, “Thank you.”
    She did not care for the big hall; it was too large and too empty, and the shadows fell strangely from its corners; and the last roof she had stood under had also been of stone—she shuddered. She would not pass these doors. The man saw the shudder and said gently, “It’s all over now. You’re quite safe.” She looked up at him—he was very tall—and wanted to say, “How do you know?” But if she asked one question, a hundred would follow, and she was tired, and lonely, and had been trained never to ask questions.
    She did not remember if it was the stag or the tall man who showed her to the long narrow room with the row of empty beds in it; she woke up burrowed in blankets in the bed nearest the door, with sunlight—late-morning sunlight, she estimated, blinking—flaming through the row of windows high above her head.
    Her sleeping hall, she discovered, was built out from one wall of the great central chamber she had peered into the night before. The tall man sat on the front steps she had climbed, her hand on the stag’s shoulder, the night before; his long hands dangled idly between his bent knees. He looked up at her as she stepped from the sleeping hall; his hair blazed as yellow as corn in the sunlight. He wore a plain brown tunic over pale leggings and soft boots, and around his neck on a thong was a red stone. She turned away from him; around her on three sides were trees, and on the fourth side, the great grey hall; overhead the sky was a clear, hard blue. She lowered her eyes, finally, and met the man’s gaze; he smiled at her.
    â€œI am Luthe,” he said.
    She did not answer immediately. “I am Ruen. But you know that, or I would not be here.” Her voice—she could not help it—had a sharp, mistrustful edge to it.
    Luthe spread his fingers and looked down at them. “That is not precisely true. I did not know your name till now, when you told it to me. Your … difficulties … were brought to my attention recently, and it is true that I asked, um, a friend if he would help you out of them. And I asked him to bring you here.”
    â€œA friend,” she said, the edge to her voice gone. She closed her eyes a moment; but there was little she cared to remember, and she opened them again, and tried to smile. “It is pleasanter to thank you—and him—without thinking about what, and how much, I have to be grateful to you for.” She paused. “I would like to declare, here, today, that I have no past. But then I have no future either. Have you a use for me?”
    â€œYes,” said Luthe.
    â€œI suppose you will now tell me that I may not forsake my past so? Well. I am not surprised. I never learned so much as … my uncle wished to teach me, but I did learn a little.”
    â€œYou learned far more than he wished you to,” Luthe said grimly. “Had you cooperated to the extent of idiocy, as would have pleased him best, he would not have had to disturb the weather for half the world to invent portents for his insignificant corner of it.”
    She smiled involuntarily. She had never heard anyone speak with less than complete respect of the Regent; and these few words from this strange man reduced her uncle to nothing more than a nuisance, a bothersome thing to be dealt with; and suddenly her past was not the doom of her future. “That awful weather was his …?” She sobered. “But I am still a poor excuse for a queen, even if he is not a—an entirely honorable Regent.”
    Luthe laughed. “You