Changer of Days Read Online Free PDF

bed and no wider than perhaps five short paces from wall to wall. There was an old, rusted fitting on the wall just above the straw. Anghara had to stare at it for a while before it occurred to her that it was a flange for fastening a chain. There had been a mate—once she knew what to look for, Anghara could see the hole in the wall where it should have been attached, but it had either been removed a long time ago or simply rotted away. They were just the right distance apart to spreadeagle a prisoner against the wall.
    “I should be grateful,” Anghara murmured to herself, shuddering, “that they didn’t see fit to put me up in those.”
    Aside from these grisly furnishings, the straw pallet, the jug of water and the latrine hole, the place was empty, the walls blank, the ceiling low and louring. The cell wasn’t quite dark—faint light from a torch outside in the corridor filtered through the open grille, and it was this that had allowed Anghara her scrutiny. Her mouth curled into a tight, bitter little smile.
    “But the Gods always give what you ask for,” she whispered softly, remembering her wishes on the journey to this place—a small, dark place to sleep, and to be left alone. She had been given it all. “How long, I wonder? How long before you forget all about me, Sif…or before you send a loyal sword to end everything?”
    It wasn’t clean. She would never have done it like this. The drugs…the dungeons…it wasn’t clean. It stained the name of Kir Hama, the proud lineage of ancient royal blood.
    Kieran’s voice suddenly came to her, from years ago—that day on the banks of a Cascin well, on which he had first found out who she was. Sif is your brother …
    And then her mother’s, from before even that, from the mists of memory that clung to the mind of a child, perhaps only three or four years old: He looks like you, Rima had said, standing at a window and watching the young Sif in a courtyard below. Behind her, the shadowy figure of her husband had smiled. He had chosen never to hear the bitterness that edged Rima’s voice every time the subject of his son came up between them.
    Her brother. Her own father’s son.
    None of it mattered. He was king in a land he had wrested from the hand of a little girl. That she had been born to the crown, that she had worn it before him—all this was irrelevant. Dynan was dead, Sif was king, and there was space on the Throne Under the Mountain for only one monarch to reign over Roisinan. And it was his land as well as her own.
    She could have witched the door of that dungeon open quite easily with what ai’Jihaar had taught her over the years—if only she could have touched the power without seeming to tear at her mind with poisoned talons. Maybe it was the drug—perhaps, Anghara thought hopefully, now they had her safely in here they would forget about the tamman, giving her a chance to recover. Perhaps. There was nothing for it but to wait—for what, she was not quite sure, but wait she must.
    They hadn’t quite forgotten about her yet, at any rate, because she was shaken from a light doze by the rattle of a small trapdoor she hadn’t noticed before. It opened near the bottom of the cell door, only just wide enough to admit a battered tin plate.
    “Supper,” a gruff voice announced, “and if you want fresh water pass the jug out with the plate when you’re done.”
    Anghara had surged from her place on the pallet—but her head still swam when she moved too fast, and the few precious moments it took her to gasp herself back into a semblance of steadiness were all it took for her efforts to be in vain. She stood on tiptoe next to the door, trying to peer out into the corridor.
    “Wait!” she called. “Come back!” But her only reply was silence.
    Defeated, she sank down on her knees beside the plate of food. It looked greasily congealed, and, worse, cold; but she was starving. Her mind recoiled but her stomach accepted—it was food, and after