Foul Tide's Turning Read Online Free PDF Page A

didn’t have time for that. It was the head of the snake he needed to sever. He glanced back towards the office’s shutting door, the prefect disappearing. Maybe the tail of the snake requires a little severing, too . Jacob’s mind wandered to his son and the guild courier, safe in the librarian’s hold. Whatever the contents of the mystery message Tom Purdell had carried in, Jacob just knew it wasn’t going to be good news.

TWO
    UP IN THE BIG HOUSE
    As always, Willow cringed when she heard her name screeched, hating herself even as she did. Willow Landor was a free woman again, female heir to the House of Landor’s considerable fortunes. Should she really feel this helpless? After all, it was ridiculous that she had survived the worst excesses of being held as human property and worked close to death, beaten and starved, yet could still flinch at that woman’s voice. And this – Willow’s position in the family – was really the problem. At least for Leyla Holten. Or should that be, née Holten, now Landor by marriage? Not that Willow would ever recognize the woman’s new surname. To her, the interloper would always be Holten.
    Of all the shocks that Willow had endured recently, the worst had been returning home to find her father re-married to a gold-digging harpy from the south. A woman almost young enough to be Willow’s sister. But give the woman her due, she certainly put on all the airs and graces of Mistress of Hawkland Park, and had taken to ordering Willow around as if she really was her mother. In reality, she was nowhere close. Willow’s mother had been a decent, kind woman before she passed away from sickness; she had been the conscience of the estate, keeping her husband Benner Landor’s worst instincts in check. What was Leyla Holten? Some ludicrous fortune-hunting stage actress from Arcadia, famed for her beauty and charm. Willow had seen precious little of the latter, although she recognized that the malicious woman could turn it on and off like a faucet, especially when it came to wheedling her way around Willow’s father or any other man in her vicinity. The Songbird , that had been her nickname in the capital. The journalists who had so named her had clearly never heard her shrieking at them at home. They probably had never seen past the wide blue eyes and long golden hair so fine it almost appeared silver in certain light; just the right height not to appear too threatening to a man – not too tall, not too short.
    And the man who had fallen hook, line and sinker for her allure? Willow had hardly seen her father since she had returned. To be fair to him, he was deeply involved in rebuilding the town and improving his house’s fortunes in the process. It was obvious that it was his son’s continued absence that he regretted. And that had turned into resentment against her … that she could have been so cold and unfeeling as to flee the Vandian empire while leaving her brother behind. That was a re-writing of history if ever there had been one. Before the town had been raided by slavers, Willow’s brother, Duncan Landor, had been deeply uninterested in managing the family business, preferring to duel and drink his life away, when he wasn’t pursuing every unsuitable woman in striking distance. After Northhaven’s youth had been sold to the mines by the slave traders, Duncan had impressed another of those unseemly women, being taken away as a plaything for a local princess, eventually deigning to send for Willow and offering her a similar ticket out of the mines. Was it any wonder she had refused the rotten offer and helped lead the slave revolt back to Weyland? But Willow’s father would hear none of this. Instead, Duncan’s place in history had been rewritten to make him some sort of golden child who had done no wrong while living under the mansion’s roof. And Willow cast as the wicked villain for having ‘abandoned’ the house’s young heir in Vandia, while selfishly saving