Read Online Song of the Beast by Carol Berg - Free Book Online Page A

promising myself that her short life would not be forgotten.
    â€œIt’s my pleasure. You—Well, clothes are laid out for you when you’re feeling up to it. Washing things on the dresser. I’ll arrange for dinner to be sent. My master is most anxious to speak with you, but I’m insisting you take things slowly, so we’ll hold him off awhile yet.”
    I cupped my hands to my chest and bowed my head in appreciation, noting how when his eyes flicked to my hands, his mouth hardened into a grim line. “Gentle Roelan, preserve us,” he mumbled as he left the room. He knew who I was.
    I was tempted to follow him out the door and discover who was his master, my benefactor. But the bed was far too comfortable. I drained the wineglass, set it on the physician’s tray, and sprawled out on my stomach once again.
    Â 
    Fine smells ... roasting fowl ... hot bread ... My eyes blinked open. A covered silver tray sat beside the bed exuding fragrances that made my stomach do back flips. The candle on the mantelpiece had burned down a third of its length. An hour had passed. Though my physician friend was gone, I didn’t think I needed to wait for him. With a glutton’s delight, I plunged into the tender roast fowl, stewed apples, delicate cheeses and pastries.
    The decanter of wine had been refilled, and I required a good measure of it as I awkwardly coaxed a silver razor to scrape two days’ growth from my face. When I’d last looked in a glass, I had been twenty-one, impossibly healthy, and filled with the unutterable joy of spending my life doing what I loved most. I had been immeasurably graced by the gods, and everyone had always said they could see it in my face. Now I was thirty-eight or thereabouts and had touches of gray in my hair and the reflection of Mazadine in my eyes. It was a dead man who looked back at me.
    Lacking a dead man’s luxury of immobility, I donned the simple full-sleeved shirt of dark blue, the black breeches and hose, and the good boots that had been left on a chair. All were exactly my size except for the breeches, which had to be belted in considerably to accommodate the lack of meat on my frame. I’d probably lost a third of my weight in prison.
    Only after I’d poured another glass of wine and sat in the physician’s chair by the cold hearth did I notice the harp that lay on a round table next to the door—a small harp, just the size I had carried when I traveled, its polished rosewood frame glowing richly in the candlelight. I moved over to stand beside the moonlit window—as far from the harp as I could get—and tried to ignore the resounding silence that was in the place where my heart used to be. It was perhaps not a good time for my cousin, the king of Elyria, to walk into the room.
    The years had not passed lightly over Devlin. His face was lined with too much sun and wind, and coarsened with too much wine. We had been of a size in our youth, but now he carried almost as much bulk as his father, who had been a bull of a man. A long scar gleamed white on one tanned cheek, and his eyes told me that he had seen a great deal of death.
    How do you greet someone who has stolen half your life, murdered your friends, and destroyed your heart? I could not speak—would not give him the satisfaction of hearing the donkey’s bray he had left me to replace the songs of a god. Instead I poured the remainder of my wine onto his polished wood floor and dropped the goblet beside the pool, splattering shards of glass and red droplets all over the room. Then I stood in silence, waiting for him to explain why he had chosen to offer me a day of comfort and healing after sending me to the netherworld for seventeen years.
    He gazed at me unblinking, unspeaking, and I thought it must be to see if I was afraid. But after a moment it came to me that he wasn’t sure how to begin. When he did, his voice was soft and intense. “I