Read Online Wither by Lauren DeStefano - Free Book Online Page A

I convinced him it will be easier, with new wives already in the house.” She closes her eyes and yawns. “Besides, he was starting to get teased in the social circles. Most House Governors have at least three wives, sometimes seven—one for every day of the week.” It’s absurd enough that she laughs a little, sup-presses a cough. “But not Linden. Housemaster Vaughn has been trying to talk him into it for years, and he has always refused. Finally he agreed to it, as long as he had a choice in the selection. He didn’t even have a choice with me.”
    Her voice is cool, and she is so bizarrely serene. It worries me that I’ve become her favorite new bride simply for my blond hair, my vague resemblance to her. She is such a brilliant, well-read girl, and I wonder if she has figured out that I’ll never love Linden, especially not in the way she does, and that he’ll never love anyone the way he loves her. I wonder if she realizes, despite all her efforts to train me, that I can never take her place.

“I want to play a game,” Cecily says.
    Jenna doesn’t look up from her novel. She’s strewn languidly on the couch, with her legs dangling over the armrest. “No shortage of those.”
    “I don’t mean the keyboard or virtual skiing,” Cecily insists. “I mean a game game.” She looks to me for help, but the only game I know is the one where my brother and I set noise traps in the kitchen and try to survive the night intact. And when I was taken by Gatherers, I sort of lost.
    I’m curled up on the window ledge in the sitting room—a room that is filled with virtual sports games and a keyboard meant to imitate a symphony orches-tra—and I have been staring at the orange tree blossoms that flutter like thousands of tiny white-winged descending birds. Rowan wouldn’t even believe them, the life they imply, the health and beauty. Manhattan is full of gasping, shriveled weeds that grow from the asphalt.
    Refrigerator-smelling carnations for sale that are more science than flower.
    “Don’t you know any games?” Cecily is asking me directly now. I feel her brown eyes staring at me.
    Well. There was one game, with paper cups and string, and the little girl who lived across the alleyway. I open my mouth, prepared to explain it, but change my mind.
    I don’t want to whisper my secrets into a paper cup to share with my sister wives. Really I only have one secret that’s worth anything, and that’s my plan to escape.
    “We could play virtual fishing,” I say. I can feel Cecily’s indignation without even looking at her.
    “There has to be something real we could do,” she says. “There has to be.” She paces out of the room, and I hear her shuffling around down the hall.
    “Poor kid,” Jenna says, and rolls her eyes toward me for a moment. Then she returns to her book. “She doesn’t even understand what kind of place this is.”
    It happens at noon. Gabriel brings my lunch to me in the library—which has become my new favorite place—and stops to look over my shoulder when he sees the sketch of a boat on the page.
    “What are you reading?” he asks.
    “A history book,” I say. “This one explorer proved the world was round by assembling a team and sailing all the way around it on three boats.”
    “The Nina , Pinta , and Santa Maria ,” he says.
    “You know about world history?” I ask.
    “I know about boats,” he says, and sits behind me on the arm of the overstuffed chair and points to the image.
    “This one here is a caravel.” He begins describing its structure to me—the trio of masts, the lateen rigging.
    All I truly understand from this is that the style was Spanish. But I don’t interrupt him. I can see the intensity in his blue eyes, that he’s taken a brief respite from the sullen work of cooking for and catering to Linden’s brides, that he has a passion for something.
    Sitting in his shadow in the overstuffed chair, I actually feel a smile coming on.
    That’s when