Read Online The Hidden Queen by Alma Alexander - Free Book Online Page B

but his attention was still on Cascin’s lord. “Has there been any news out of Miranei?”
    “Some,” said Lyme. “You travelled slowly; news flies. It filters through the han, they know things there almost before they have happened; I keep a man at Halas constantly, and we hear anything new almost as soon as the han knows of it. Sif is at Miranei, with the army, but at the last count the keep was still holding against him.”
    March’s head came up, his eyes bright in his white face. “Still? They hold still? I thought…”
    “It can’t be much longer now,” said Lyme. There was sorrow in his voice; he saw Rima’s death in the eventual fall of Miranei, and he was deeply distressed. “The child?” he asked, thoughts of Rima followed almost immediately by thoughts of her daughter, the cause of this desperate journey.
    “She is asleep, my lord,” said Catlin. “This has been a hard day for her.”
    “Her room is prepared,” said a new voice, and Catlin curtsied lightly to Lady Chella, Lyme’s wife and sister to Dynan’s doomed queen, who had joined them in the court. “Were you one of my sister’s suite, lady? What is your name?”
    “Anghara’s own,” said Catlin. “I am Catlin.” Her voice cracked on a yawn she could not quite swallow.
    Chella smiled. “Let us bed the child down, and then perhaps you too can seek some rest. It has been a hard day for you all, and a harder journey.” Her eyes glittered in the torchlight as she came up to the wagon, clear gray, Rima’s eyes that Anghara had inherited. “Tomorrow we will have to think of a plan,” she said. “There are few in my household who know who the child is, and it is better not to stir up questions best left unasked. We will find you a place here, Lady Catlin, but she cannot be seen to have a personal attendant, not in the station in which she has been cast, or else people will start wondering. But for tonight, do you wish to share her chamber? She might find tomorrow easier in a strange place if she wakes to the sight of a friend.”
    “You are kind,” said Catlin in a low voice.
    Chella, who had reached into the wagon to gather Anghara into her arms, smiled down at the sleeping child. Sudden tears sparkled on her lashes. “Yes,” she said softly. “But kindness is a fragile enough cocoon for her, from whom so much has been taken. Kindness I can give her, and a kinswoman’s love. I only wonder if it will be enough when the cold winds find her?”
    They put Anghara to bed without her offering more than a faint, mumbled protest at the gentle removal of her travelling clothes. Certainly she had no memory of arriving at Cascin, or of being carried into the room in which she found herself when she opened her eyes into the bright light of the next morning. She had half expected to see the close hangings of the wagon all around her, and feel the gently swaying wagon floor beneath. For a moment it was strange to find herself once again in a room that, despite lacking the grandeur of her chambers in Miranei, still had more style and grace than the sparsely furnished and barely comfortable rooms offered by the average roadside han. She was alone, but Catlin poked her head round the door almost the moment Anghara opened her eyes, and the rest of her followed when she saw her young charge had finally roused.
    “Good, you’re awake. You’ve slept almost twelve hours; you must have really needed a good rest in a decent bed.”
    “Where are we?” murmured Anghara, or Brynna as she had learned to think of herself even first thing in the morning, rubbing the sleep from her eyes.
    “Cascin. We’re here at last. Come now, get up; your breakfast has been waiting for the better part of two hours.”
    Brynna found herself to be ravenously hungry all of a sudden at the mention of breakfast. She swung her legs out of bed and sat up, pushing her long hair out of her eyes. She accepted, as every morning, Catlin’s gentle ministrations—shrugged