Blades Of Illusion: Crown Service #2 Read Online Free PDF Page A

necromancer and guardsman who had barged into her home, demanded the file on her father, and killed her mother in a single night.
    “But no,” she muttered under her breath, “I’m slogging through knee-deep muddy water and hoping not to get gangrene from an infection. This isn’t war . This is torture.”

Chapter 4
    H er mind flashed back to the men she had met in the taverns. She had done her best to get as much information out of them as she could. Back then, when she was fourteen, she still had the hopes of joining the imperial army as an officer. And why wouldn’t she? She was a commander’s daughter and trained in the art of battle. But Sara knew that her abrupt appearance in the seedy underbelly of the city would not be taken well, especially if her father’s men spotted her. An imperial war brat born and raised had no business in a seedy tavern after all.
    If my father had known where I was going after slipping out of my chambers at night, he would have tanned my hide, Sara thought to herself wryly.
    Fortunately for a sneaky young woman, her father’s frequent relocations for war made it easier to evade his constant surveillance. Not that he didn’t try to make sure his men stationed in Sandrin kept a wary eye on her. Sara missed those loyal to her father. Most had traveled with him on his last assignment out as a Commander of the imperial forces—the assignment he had died on. She didn’t have concrete knowledge about what happened to his men. Mostly because an army that refused to disclose information about her father’s death certainly had no compunctions about keeping back information on the men and women who served under him. Where Sara once would have access to the highest levels of military information as she grew older, now she languished as a pariah in their eyes just because of who her father was and what he had done. Consequently, she only knew as much as any one person was willing to pass on to her. She had heard that the majority of her father’s people had been re-assigned to far-flung outposts. To keep them out of ‘trouble’ and away from each other, she supposed. Sara had to wonder what the imperial forces were so afraid of that they would execute her father, seal his records, disappear the files, and disband his men.
    “Whatever it is,” she said grimly, “It had better have been worth his death. Because I swear I will find out this empire’s secrets or die trying. I owe my father that much.”
    A small, tight smile crossed Sara’s face as she remembered her father’s heavily-muscled form training in the arena, with his short-cropped brown hair plastered to his head with sweat and his clear, grey eyes squinting in concentration at his opponent. Sara knew she and her father hadn’t looked a thing alike. But appearances could be deceiving. Sara had inherited her father’s talent for fighting, his tenacity and his height. From her mother, Sara had taken her darker skin and her long black curls that bounced with every movement of her body. Where he burned with the sun and peeled, she darkened and evened out. Even when tan, her father hadn’t gotten much darker than the inside of a pecan’s shell.
    Still, Sara thought she had the best of both parents. Her mother’s vivacity. Her father’s determination. Sara had no idea where she had gotten her vivid orange eyes from, as neither of her parents had her eye coloring.
    “Cat eyes,” her father had approvingly called them, “Cat eyes for my kitling that can see in the night like a fierce huntress on the prowl.”
    Her mother had been less complimentary about the topic. Sara remembered her mother saying reprovingly, “She does not have cat eyes.” Usually her mother’s own brown eyes would be sparkling with a teasing gleam when she looked at Sara’s father, but that day she hadn’t been joking. She never joked when the subject of Sara’s eyes came up.
    Anna Beth Fairchild had feared nothing and no one, but Sara could have