Lord of Snow and Shadows Read Online Free PDF

you the right? To bring me against my will?”
    “Because you are our Drakhaon, whether you will or no,” the old warrior said.
    “And my mother?” He pictured Elysia alone, frantically searching the villa, the gardens, the empty shore, calling his name in vain. “I don’t suppose you thought to tell her of your plan? Did it ever cross your mind that she might be distressed at finding that her only son has disappeared?”
    Kostya shrugged again. “You can send word to her from Arkhelskoye.”
    The swinging lantern flame was making Gavril feel seasick again. He closed his eyes but still it etched a trail of fire on his lids.
    “And how long am I to remain your prisoner?” he heard himself asking as if from a great distance away. The tumult of the heaving waves seemed to be growing louder. Kostya’s answer sounded as if from far away, a lone sea-mew’s cry across fogbound waters.
    “You are Drakhaon, lord; you are not our prisoner.”
    “It seems to me . . .” An overwhelming heaviness had begun to seep through Gavril’s body. “That the two . . . are one and the same . . .” The odd taste of the water was still bitter in his dry mouth. Drugged. They had drugged him. He tried one last time to rise up, hand outstretched in impotent anger. The roaring of the foggy waters dinned in his ears and he was falling back down, down through the lightless depths of a nameless sea.
             
    The delirious strains of a waltz whirl through Gavril’s dreams. “White Nights” . . .
    He is in the ballroom of the Villa Orlova.
    Dark shadow-figures flit past, their faces concealed by grotesque masks: feathered, hook-beaked like birds of prey, or grinning like gargoyles. The once rich hangings are moldering, powdered with dust; the chandeliers with their guttering candles are draped with grimy cobwebs. But still the dancers spin dizzyingly around the mirrored ballroom to the frenetic waltz.
    “Astasia!” he cries, scanning the dance floor for her. He pushes in among the frenzied dancers, going from couple to couple, searching.
    “Gavril?”
    He hears her answering cry and catches sight of her across the floor, pale in her white gown, arms outstretched.
    He runs toward her—and the dancers turn on him, the leering, grinning masks looming out of the darkness as they catch hold of him, spinning him around, white-gloved fingers pawing, clawing.
    “Help me, Gavril!”
    Astasia, dragged away into the darkness . . .
    The dance music fractures into discordant fragments, shattering like the shards of a broken mirror. . . .
             
    Gavril opened his eyes. The stench of tar, the creak of timbers, the splash of the swell of an ice-cold sea, the incessant rocking all told him he was still a prisoner on the Azhkendi vessel, sailing ever farther away from Astasia by the hour.
             
    White light seared Gavril’s eyes: thin, cold winter sunlight. He staggered as he came up on deck and felt Kostya catch hold of him, supporting him.
    “One step at a time, Lord Gavril. Easy does it.”
    “Where . . . is . . . this place?” Gavril covered his dazzled eyes with his hand. He felt as weak as the time he was ill with the quinsy, wandering for days in a raging fever that left him thin and unsteady as a newborn foal. But then he had been dosed with physic, not the powerful sedative drugs he guessed Kostya had used to subdue him.
    The barque moved slowly forward through the ice floes, rocking gently on a sea as pale as milk. Gavril took hold of the rail, trying to steady himself.
    “The White Sea,” he murmured.
    There was a crackling glitter to the expanse of water that stretched into a misty horizon. The sea glimmered with a sheen of ice. Even the air sparkled with frost.
    “We passed the last merchant ships out of Arkhelskoye,” Kostya said, his breath smoking on the frosty air. “The sea is freezing fast around us.” He leaned on the rail, frowning out at the ice-hazed horizon. “Too fast. There’s