Read Online My True Love by Karen Ranney - Free Book Online Page B

rock. But it seemed to be something more. A line of thick trees flirted with the view. The air, hazed by the brisk wind, added to the mystery.
    It appeared almost like a tower. Not a square tower, as Dunniwerth boasted, but a round and elegant structure topped with crenellated teeth of stone. There was something familiar about it, something haunting and mystical that lured her to walk across the expanse of green and see it more closely. A few minutes later she was out of breath and transfixed.
    It was her castle.
    A pair of birds sat close together on a branch nearby, their heads still and almost touching. Their tail feathers were in perfect alignment, pointing to the ground, identical white spots upon their tips like tiny arrow points. They looked to be discussing the climate or the other birds or something that only birds would know, a discourse held in a secret language undecipherable by mere mortals. The call of a crow, raucous and demanding, dislodged them from their comfortable perch, led them into being birds again and not companions.
    A squirrel chattered at her, clung upside down onto the broad trunk of a venerable tree. His face lifted, and he frowned at her, as if questioning her presence, so silent and still in this place of enchantment.
    For that was what it was. A time out of time, held frozen for that moment or however many moments she stood there.
    The last time she’d seen it had been in her mind. Nestled beside a boiling river, haughty and aloof in its befogged majesty. The bailey had been green with growth. The air had been perfumed with scents of flowers, and from the embrasures had come the petulant warble of newly hatched baby birds.
    She could almost feel the grass of the bailey beneath her feet, knew where it grew bare in places like a bald man’s pate. She could point out how high the river swept to the side of the wall. Below the buttery was a stairway that led to the riverbank, and it was here supplies were brought into the castle. There was a chamber that contained an odd oblong basin, and the oddest room of all, empty except for a tall wooden structure that fanned out like a broody hen and was filled with quills and glass bottles and stacks of parchment.
    Time had changed the place she’d seen in her vision. Time and the hand of nature, if not man’s. The castle rose up before her, no longer haughty. A stone maiden, perhaps, her dignity still intact, but her face wrinkled and worn. Even the sky, dismal and gray, seemed to mourn the change. One of the three towers was no more than rubble, another leaned perilously to the side. Only a third still stood proud and resolute. Memories furnished her eyes with details missing in actuality. The gate was no longer there, the broad front door had been taken down.
    A river stretched between her and the castle. The only way across was a brick bridge that spanned the expanse. Time had not treated it well. It looked to be almost fragile, imperiously so. Anne walked slowly over the bridge, gauging her safety by the groan and creak of hidden timbers. A stone crumbled and fell to the ground, and for a moment, her imagination sent her following it, turning head over feet, toward the frothy water. She looked over the side, surprised to find that the river was placid beneath her.
    At the other side of the bridge, the ground rose upward slightly to the middle bailey. There the grass was thick and green and as tall as her knees.
    Once it had been a place where people congregated. Laughter and jests, gossip and news, they had all been exchanged upon this broad rise of earth. There to the right was the upper bailey, where the entrance to the great hall lay. She walked a few dozen feet beyond, stopped, and looked around her. A gate should be here. One constructed of iron and stone and fitted with a small guardhouse.
    A feeling of almost unbearable sadness rose within her. She turned slowly, measuring the destruction around her. Hearing in her mind the echoes of voices