A Town Called Dust: The Territory 1 Read Online Free PDF

necessary. The room was silent for a moment, but that ominous knock on the door never came.
    “I think we should step outside, Lynnette,” Ms Apple said before addressing the class as a whole. “Excuse me a moment, children.”
    Lynn followed Ms Apple out of the room and into the corridor. The teacher closed the door behind them and looked up and down the hallway, but there was no movement and the doors of the other classrooms were closed. Ms Apple made her horrible “tsk” noise, the sound she made by pulling her tongue back from her teeth. Then, to ensure the point was made, she followed it with a gentle sigh. Lynn, her eyes on the floor, prepared herself for the lecture she was about to receive, but it didn’t come as expected.
    “You are more like your mother than you know,” Ms Apple said. Lynn looked up. Her features had softened, giving Lynn some hope that she might escape without her father learning of yet another argument between the pair.
    “She had the same fiery attitude. Perhaps it comes from the songstress blood in you.”
    Lynn could not remember her grandmother—she had died when Lynnette was three or four years old—but she had been the renowned singer Gabriella, a woman as famous throughout the city of Alice for her extraordinary tantrums as she was for her angelic voice. Ms Apple had once told her the story of how her grandmother had demanded apple stew after a performance. The stew was to be made only from the left side of apples from a certain tree in the Western Regions. When this ludicrous demand could not be met Gabriella had gone back on stage and attempted to undo her performance by singing the entire performance backward.
    Although she would never admit it to Ms Apple, Lynn was pretty sure she had inherited this predisposition for stubbornness. But that wasn’t all she had inherited. Lynn’s hair fell down her back in oversized blonde curls just as her mother’s and her grandmother’s had before her. Lynn brushed her hair nightly, sometimes for an hour, even though no matter how many times she pulled the coarse brush through it, the locks would instantly spring back into large spirals. Her mother had brushed her hair the same way, every night without fail. Now her hair was all that Lynn had left of her mother. The few trinkets her mother had bequeathed her were cold and soulless, but her mother’s hair was with her. It bounced when Lynn laughed; it was alive.
    Her hair may have been immaculately kept but Lynn’s body betrayed her love of more unladylike activities. Her light frame was strung together with muscles built from riding, climbing and swinging a sword, and her clothes were often soiled with red dirt or grass stains. But at fifteen years of age one thing Lynn did not appear to be inheriting from her mother was her bosom. Her chest was flatter than a dirt farm.
    Lynn looked back down at the floor.
    “But,” Ms Apple was saying, “your mother knew when to hold her tongue, and Lynn,” Ms Apple reached out and lifted Lynn’s chin so that their eyes met, “I do hope you learn to do the same, because I do not want to see you in trouble, especially with the Sisters.”
    Lynn felt her eyes growing hot and her lip quivering.
    “I believe you should be sent home for the day,” Ms Apple said. “Besides, your father asked for you to be home early for your brother’s oath-taking.”
    “He’s not my brother,” Lynn said.

CHAPTER 4
    There was a knock on Lynn’s bedroom door: two short raps on the wood and then the door swung open. That was the way her father entered a room, confidently, without waiting for a response. Lynn spun to face the door, hiding the wooden sword behind her back as her father, Colonel Alfred Hermannsburg, strode into the room.
    Alfred Hermannsburg was a tall man, wide shouldered, but lean at the waist like a precariously balancing pyramid. He was dressed in his formal uniform, a light green shirt and tie, stiff green jacket decorated with a golden