Read Online Wings of Flame by Nancy Springer - Free Book Online

more quietly but more fiercely. “Don’t you understand?”
    â€œAll right. I’ll help you dye your mourning!” She threw up her small, twiggy hands and marched off downhill, toward where she judged a rivulet might run. “Don’t expect to sleep,” she added sharply over her shoulder. Until then she had taken the main burden of nighttime watching, reasoning that Kyrem was mending and needed his rest. Until then.
    They found the plant, made their small camp, stripped the needed bark and placed it in a kettle of water to boil, all in silence. There was nothing to eat and no pot to cook it in. Seda shrugged and sat by the fire. Kyrem scowled.
    Three mocking voices sounded in the dusk. “Where’s your mother?” one neighed. “Where’s your lover?” chanted the second. “Bastard! Bastard!” the third one cried.
    â€œThat’s right, demons dear,” said Kyrem morosely. “Curse me all you like. Here I sit, hungry, twelve comrades dead on my account, called mad by the one remaining”—he cocked a sour eye at Seda—“attended by flapping monsters, sent off into unknown peril by the command of a father who probably uses me more than loves me—” He stopped.
    â€œYou think your father has betrayed you into danger?” Seda asked, astonished.
    Kyrem jumped up and paced, as if to outstrip his anger. “It is hard to say,” he hedged. “He chose me out of the dozen of us, and I am not the eldest—he would never send his eldest son, the heir, on such an errand. Nor am I the youngest, or the cleverest, or—or anything. He sent for me and told me without a word of explanation that I was to go as hostage to Deva, without encouragement or sorrow or emotion of any kind. That is his way, and I should be accustomed to it by now, but I can’t help feeling like … like an outcast.”
    Though they had shared much in the course of their journey, he had not yet shared so much of himself with her, and she felt all the honor of it. Instantly peace was made, anger forgotten and only empathy left. She knew that outcast feeling well. “Surely your mother was sorrowful to see you go,” she said anxiously.
    â€œI have no mother.” He laughed at her expression, the warm laugh of a friend and equal. “It is true! We princes are all bastards. The king sows his seed where he will, that is the custom, and he brings home his choice of the crop. We boys were all raised together in a big barracks.”
    â€œSo that is what you meant,” Seda said. “What you and the others told me that first day.”
    â€œThat we were all bastards? That was part of it.” He sat beside her again. “It’s a sort of joke also, the Devan way of saying that we are none of us any too sweet. Devans are a tolerant folk.”
    He was forever extolling Devans. That was his inner defense, Seda guessed in a quick rush of insight. There was a vulnerability about him she had not seen before.… He stood up and unlaced his shirt, preparing to place it in the dye pot, and the girl turned away from the sight of his strong, naked shoulders, feeling a thrill she refused to acknowledge or admit to.
    â€œSeda,” said Kyrem rather suddenly, “have you ever thought of looking for that twin you think you have?”
    Odd that he should mention that scarcely remembered other. Odd; since her flux she had felt for the first time that absence, that lack, like an ache or an empty place, like hunger.
    â€œYour brother whom you have never known.”
    Sister. She had told him something of herself during their weeks together, but not the secret that troubled her the most. Her young breasts were swelling, a development she noted with dismay; she bound them sternly beneath her rough shirt so that he would not feel them against his back as they rode. She was still a boy to him.
    â€œDo you think you might be a Devan? You