Read Online The Safe-Keeper's Secret by Sharon Shinn - Free Book Online Page B

“what was the crisis that kept you from our presence so long this morning?”
    None of the ten-year-olds began work yet on their math problems, just held their pencils suspended above their papers. Everybody in the room wanted to hear the answer to this.
    â€œAm I late?” Cal asked outrageously, drawling the words. “Stupid rooster. It doesn’t seem to know morning from night anymore.”
    â€œBlaming a farm animal. That doesn’t seem right,” Miss Elmore replied. “I think you need to take a little more responsibility for your own actions.”
    â€œWell, I’m responsible for feeding him. Maybe if I let him go hungry a few mornings he’ll wake up a little faster.”
    The boys sitting around him laughed. Fiona smiled. Miss Elmore was not amused.
    â€œMaybe if I let you sit inside for a few lunch periods you’ll learn how to get here a little faster,” she said.
    Calbert scowled. “I’m not staying in at lunch.”
    Miss Elmore shrugged. “Or you can stay an hour after class for three days. Your choice.”
    Cal couldn’t stay after class, and everyone knew it, since his father required him to be home in time to help with evening chores. Cal’s father actually wasn’t entirely sure an education was what his boy needed, and public opinion pretty much assumed that Cal stayed in school only to spite his father. At times like these, Fiona worried that Miss Elmore’s strictness might make Cal decide that working full time on the farm was better than spending half his life in class.
    But Cal was too imperturbable to let on if Miss Elmore had bested him. He shrugged and settled back more comfortably in his chair. “Fine. I’ll sit in at lunch. Doesn’t matter to me.”
    â€œGood,” said Miss Elmore briskly. “Now. While the younger children work on math, I want the rest of you to sit and listen. I’m going to read you a story written by a royal scribe in Wodenderry.”
    Fiona half listened to the story Miss Elmore read, but she wasn’t too engaged by the tale. She put more of her attention on the arithmetic. She didn’t think she had completed her addition correctly on at least three of the problems, and she wished Reed was sitting close enough so that she could surreptitiously show him her paper and he could indicate her success by a smile or a frown. But she was sitting near the back and Reed was in the front row. Miss Elmore had separated them three weeks ago for just such an infraction. So she sighed and looked over the problems again, trying to drown out the sound of Miss Elmore’s voice.
    Once the reading was over, the entire classroom turned to history and geography, and then they were all given writing assignments modulated by grade. Lunchtime couldn’t come fast enough after that, and they all spilled out into the dirt clearing that served as their play area when they weren’t trapped inside.
    Fiona took her lunch with a couple of the girls in her class, eating the bread and cheese and apple that her mother had packed for her the night before. She would have preferred to eat with Reed, but he always gobbled everything down in five minutes and then ran off somewhere with his friends. She could always hear them thrashing about in the woods nearby, or yodeling out insults, or throwing things that might not have done much damage but always generated a great deal of noise.
    Today she had just finished her meal when Reed materialized beside her, a long red scratch weeping blood along his forearm. “Reed! What did you do?”
    â€œCaught it on a branch,” he said, not overly concerned. “Do you have something I can wrap it with?”
    â€œNo, but Miss Elmore probably does,” she said. “I’ll go ask.”
    â€œThat doesn’t look like a branch mark. That looks like you got caught on a thorn,” Fiona heard one of the other girls say.
    â€œDo you