Changer of Days Read Online Free PDF Page B

the first instant, when she had to taste the foul mush, it didn’t matter what her mind thought of the meal. She finished, and banged on the door with the empty container, hoping to attract the guard back again. Nobody came. Anghara pushed the empty plate and the water jug against the little trapdoor, and stood waiting by the door in expectation, determined not to be caught napping again.
    When she woke, she was cold and stiff from the position she had collapsed into, on the cold stone floor at the foot of the cell door. The headache was back, and the nausea. They must have slipped more tamman into the food. The plate was gone, and the re-filled water jug stood by the trapdoor; Anghara was alone once more.
    They’ll never let me talk to anyone again, she thought bitterly, leaning her forehead against the cold stone wall, fighting the urge to start beating her head against it. She tried once more to reach for Sight, and paid for it by being sick all over again, only just making the latrine hole in time; she leaned over the edge of the noisome pit, continuing to retch even when there was nothing left to bring up. Now that she thought about it, there had been a ghost of a taste of the drug in the food, but she had thought it only a lingering memory of what had gone before—and even if she had known beyond a doubt, what could she do? The only options open to her were to suffer the tamman and stay alive as long as she could, or stop eating and save Sif the trouble of killing her by starving herself to death.
    “I will live,” she muttered, but her voice was wretched even as she uttered the brave words. It was not life she was choosing—not this, not in here. For one whose every waking moment for years had been spent in the company of a powerful gift, the lack of it was an exquisite torture she was only just beginning to comprehend. She wasn’t even sure if it was a deliberate cruelty, or something careless and inadvertent, a simple side-effect of keeping her from using Sight to escape. And how did they even know she was Sighted?
    The answer came easily enough. Bresse, where they searched for her and where she would not have been if not for Sight. And Ansen, who had, almost inadvertently, led her there—who had, perhaps, brought Sif there, too, and paid a high price.
    She soon lost count of the days, and ceased to speculate about why it was taking Sif so long to get round to killing her. She didn’t know autumn had flowed into winter and the first light snow fallen already on the mountain, or that blizzards piled it man-deep around Miranei. Neither did she know that, on the morning of her seventeenth birthday, Sif himself stood and watched as she slept, her bright hair tangled and matted, the bones of her delicate wrist standing out like a fledgling bird’s.
    “What are your orders, my lord?” the guard had asked deferentially.
    “I will decide, in due course,” Sif had said, taking a last look and turning away. He knew he should have had her killed weeks ago, but he was finding it curiously difficult to sublimate that knowledge into action. Nothing had changed in his feelings for Anghara Kir Hama—she still stood in his way, and would for as long as she breathed, but her ghost seemed easier to bear if it was still housed in a living body he could keep under observation. Killing her would set that spirit free. The dictum would be the same as at Bresse— I did what had to be done —but Bresse had not vanished from his mind just because he had managed to rationalize its destruction, and he knew Anghara would be a far tougher ghost to lay. Even watching her now—thin, grubby, unkempt—there was still something in her that was royal, and the line of her jaw, while undoubtedly more feminine and delicate, reminded Sif forcefully of the man who had fathered them both. I could have loved her, Sif thought, surprising even himself with the idea. A younger sister…but no, she is not my sister. She could still snatch the