Of Midnight Born Read Online Free PDF Page A

cousin was nowhere in sight, and as Alex looked around he saw that he had wandered into what might once have been the kitchen garden. It was a walled area, and made up one end of the U-shaped castle foundations. Like most boys his age, he could never get enough of reading about castles, and his schoolmaster had taught him a good deal about the history of the structures.
    The garden was a mass of wildflowers and small shrubs, its grasses buzzing with insects. A small snake sunned itself atop the wall, waking and slithering quickly into a crack when his approach disturbed it. The garden was bare of trees except for one, an old monster with a massive trunk several feet around.
    Alex squinted through the sunlight at the tree, its branches sparse, thick, and stunted, as if they had been broken off in storms. It looked ancient, as old as the ruins themselves. It had gray-white bark, with rough horizontal ridges where it was not split and breaking away in black wounds or covered in pale lichens. The bark looked like that of the cherry tree he had sat in yesterday with Rhys, gorging on ripe fruit until he was ill. Only this tree was still in blossom and without leaves, whereas those in the orchard were already bearing fruit.
    The blossoms didn’t look quite like anything he’d ever seen. They were vivid pink, with dozens of petals on each flower. He continued to stare at the tree, which was massive and rough, blooming out of season with its profusion of feathery pink blossoms, and an eerie sense of the tree’s wrongness began to creep up his spine.
    The hum of the insects grew louder in his ears, and in their chattering he imagined he could hear another voice, softer, female, calling to him.
    Alex, she called. Alex…
    His body trembled, his legs going weak. He wanted to run, but could not move. It was as if some silvery energy ran through his nerves, turning his muscles to jelly.
    “Alex!” Rhys shouted from somewhere behind him. “Where are you?”
    The sound of his cousin’s voice, impatient and real, broke the spell. “Here!” he called, and backed away from the tree. “Coming!” He was unwilling to turn his back on the cherry tree, possessed by the certainty that it was somehow aware of his presence: that there was some alien sentience living within it.
    When he was a safe distance away, he turned and ran.
    They built their campfire in the shelter of one of the low walls, and as the sun set they sat around it, devouring the supper that Rhys’s mother had packed, both of them as hungry and well mannered as a pair of wolves.
    Alex knew his mother and elder sisters would throw a fit if they saw him gnawing on a slice of roast beef bare-handed, as he did now. He growled in low pleasure, ripping at the meat—imagining it was a leg of boar, imagining Philippa, Amelia, and Constance having a fit of the vapors, moaning and fanning themselves, waving a burned feather under each other’s noses at his display of barbaric manners, all the while bewailing their fate at having been given abrother to endure. Mother would look on, helpless and disapproving.
    The food was well finished by the time full dark fell upon them, late in coming at this time of year. As weariness crept up on them they grew chilled, and they crawled into their blankets, lying at right angles to each other, nearly head-to-head around the fire. They said little, staring into the flames and occasionally throwing a stick into the pit or poking at the embers. Eventually even that grew to be too much effort, and Alex drew his hands into the warmth of the blanket.
    It was the first time he had camped out-of-doors, and he felt his senses expanding into the night around him, hearing the crackle of the fire, the breeze around the low walls, and the night insects buzzing faintly. A sense of his own vulnerability slowly began to tingle over his skin as he lay exposed on the ground, without the shelter of walls or roof.
    “Her name is Serena,” Rhys said into the