Power & Majesty Read Online Free PDF

of dialogue in a familiar voice. A laugh that made her shiver, or hardened her nipples for no sensible reason.
    Yes. Marrying Cyniver would solve that too. With him at her side, the dreams would be gone.
    That nox, her dream was different. She was not in Aufleur, for a start. She was in her noxgown, running through the places of Tierce. She could not find any of the streets she knew. Where was Cheapside? Where were the docks? Where was her family’s bakery? Bolts of light fell from the sky, smashing the boats and the canal walls to pieces. She looked up and saw shapes, like people only not, flailing against glowing tendrils of fire and ice. It was as if the sky itself was attacking the city. One by one, the figures in the sky vanished in bursts of light, until they were all gone. No one left to defend us. Defend us from what?
    As Velody ran, the golden buildings peeled away from the cobblestones and were dragged into the sky. She stared in horror as the bridge broke into pieces, each of them sucked upwards with a hideous noise.
    She could hear screaming, and it could be anyone, but her heart told her it was her brothers and sisters, being swallowed by the sky.
    A body fell hard in front of her, a woman in black leathers who burst apart into a scattered heap of dead black rats.
    Velody woke with a start. She had fallen asleep in her chair. The harvest tunic slipped to the floor as she leaped up and ran to the kitchen door.
    She was still in Aufleur. It was just a dream. She knew that. And yet when she unlatched the door and stepped outside in her bare feet, she expected to see…something. Some sign that a city had been torn up by its roots and destroyed.
    I have to remember this dream , she told herself fiercely. I have to remember, I have to remember .
    How could she forget the sight of Tierce—the city of her childhood—being ripped apart like it was made of paper?
    She stood there, shivering in the darkness, holding on to what she knew.
    ‘Velody?’ said a voice, some time later. Rhian came out, carrying a quilt with her. ‘What are you doing out here? It’s only just dawn.’
    Dawn. The dreams always disappeared in daylight. Velody turned, opening her mouth to tell Rhian: Tierce. Something has happened to Tierce. My family…your family…Cyniver…
    ‘Your brother,’ Velody said finally. Yes, that. Focus on Cyniver, on his gentle hands and that smile he hid behind his spectacles when he was amused. Remember . She did not know why it was so important, only that it was.
    Rhian looked confused. ‘I don’t have a brother.’
    Velody stared at her as the courtyard lightened slowly around them both. Rhian didn’t have a brother. Of course she didn’t. None of them had families—not Delphine, nor Rhian, nor Velody. It was one of the things that bound them together—they had no one else.
    ‘I forgot,’ she said in wonder.
    ‘Were you dreaming?’ Rhian asked with an odd look on her face. ‘Whatever it was, Velody, it wasn’t real. You’re working too hard.’
    ‘That must be it,’ Velody agreed. She allowed Rhian to lead her back inside.
    Days later, when she found a collection of letters written to her by a man named Cyniver from a city called Tierce, Velody threw them away without hesitation. The words meant nothing to her.

7
Garnet
    T ierce was not our fault. It was not our Court, not our city. We had our own battles to fight.
    Ashiol came to find me after Tierce fell. He sat beside me on the wall, our legs swinging as if we were boys and courtesi again. As if we were friends. ‘Quiet nox,’ he said, the bastard. Waiting for me to say the true thing, to acknowledge what had happened.
    ‘Aye,’ I agreed. ‘But if the sky wasn’t quiet right after eating an entire frigging city, what hope would we have?’
    He said nothing, for some time.
    ‘It’s not my fault,’ I added viciously, when the silence started to gnaw at me.
    ‘Never said it was.’
    ‘Oh, no? And you haven’t come to tell me that