Inda Read Online Free PDF Page A

from Colend at the other end of the continent. It was a silent gesture, one that Joret immediately understood: the conversation now would be princess to future princess.
    Joret held her dish in both hands, emulating the Iofre, who never spilled, or slurped, or splashed. Sip, sip.
    The Iofre said, “I desire you to take my place and command tomorrow’s defense. Practice cannot begin too soon.”
    Joret turned her palm up in agreement. Everyone in the castle knew the horrible story of Tenthen’s attack by pirates twenty-five years ago, when the Adaluin’s first wife—Joret’s aunt, for whom she’d been named—and the Adaluin’s brother Indevan-Randael had not been able to hold the castle. The fire marks were still to be seen here and there, and the story had shaped everyone’s lives.
    “Very well,” Joret said, both apprehensive and grateful, for she suspected that the Iofre was being kind, in her way, to make up for the rudeness of that fellow from the royal city.
    And so they talked about Joret’s study progress, switching between Old Sartoran and Iascan, then to Marlovan, when they came at last to the first House war game of spring.
    Joret finished her steeped leaf, saluted, and withdrew, her mind already dashing away into plans for that war game. How many were to attack the castle? Perhaps it would be one of the two flights of the Riders on home detachment, or a riding or two of the household, being given secret word right now by the former Riders’ captain who served as Randael, so they could get ready.
    As Joret considered plans for her defense, Fareas stood at her window, gazing out at the misting rain.
    She tucked her hands inside her sleeves, her mind flitting between images: Joret’s happiness at her first defensive command outside of children’s games; the tiny drops of rain forming along the edge of the rail of her balcony, un derlit by the reflected sunlight from beyond the passing clouds; Inda’s happiness at the prospect of the king’s training; how his expression had matched Tanrid’s, seven years ago, on the eve of his first departure to the royal city; how those drops there looked like pearls; and how that would that be a handsome effect on a gown, tiny pearls edging sleeves, a neckline.
    She permitted the images to skip and tumble through her mind, like the children below in the courtyard, and then she forced herself to examine the hard truth, the almost unbearable truth, that all three of her children would now be in the royal city, within reach of the power factions there.
    Custom took the oldest boy away to mold him into a Marlovan commander, and the oldest girl to be fostered into the family where she would one day marry. She had known Tanrid would be trained at the academy and that his personal alliances would form there. She did not know if that academy had shaped Tanrid into the hard young man he was now, or if his nature had found its true expression in that training.
    What she did know, with profound conviction, were three things.
    First: that she, and everyone in Tenthen Castle, was bound to the memory of the Adaluin’s first family, killed in their failed defense. Not only did the story of that horror inform the decisions and actions, of every single day, but she also endured the whispered comparisons to the dead Iofre. The stories of Joret-Iofre’s beauty had shaped the outlook of the younger servants, so that Young Cook knew as well as Old Cook what the first Iofre had liked to eat, and when, and why. The stable master knew what kind of mount Joret-Iofre had preferred. The grizzled old Riding Captain from the Adaluin’s generation who, until Inda came of age, served as Shield Arm, knew Joret-Iofre’s skills at castle defense; the equally old and tough arms mistress who knew her abilities at personal defense; and always, always, the comparisons, whispered, betrayed by speculative glances, driven by the question: if the next attack came while Jarend-Adaluin was riding the