Queen of Ashes Read Online Free PDF Page A

people by impersonating Osiris. Around her, courtiers and servants alike pray out loud. Wazba, still wearing his guard uniform of a leopard skin knotted over the left shoulder, sits stoically, comforting Spot, who howls miserably after every clap of thunder.
    Another flash of lightning bursts through the slatted shutters high in the wall and Sada moans. Laila put her arms around her. Sada and Sarina are only eleven months younger than Laila, but since they enjoyed happy childhoods, they seem years younger. At nineteen, Laila often feels as if she has enough world-weariness and life experience to be their grandmother.
    Could it be that they used to play together as innocent children before Laila was sent to Memphis? They explored every secret passageway in the palace, built centuries ago to escape in time of attack and never used. Even more wonderfully frightening, they played hide-and-seek in the old quarry tunnels beneath the city, the seeker wearing a white sheet and pretending to be a mummy. Once they even slipped unripe elderberry juice into the wine of Laila’s nasty stepmother and laughed to hear of her appalling diarrhea.
    As soon as Laila returned to Sharuna as the new heir, she chose them as her personal attendants. Their father, a palace scribe, was delighted, and the girls, too. Since then, she has pampered them, trying to give them the sense of fun and security she never had.
    Two palace laborers, soaked to the skin, stagger into the storeroom.
    â€œIs the grain safe?” Laila asks, rising to her feet. “Did the foreigner manage to secure it all?”
    â€œWe were just emptying the last cart when the storm broke,” says a young man. “We took the horses to the stables, but the stranger kept unloading, even as the rain poured down and the lightning struck all around us. He’s still out there.”
    Laila grabs a torch off the wall and makes her way to the stairs, only to find Wazba blocking her path. His sword is buckled on, and he’s holding his figure-eight-shaped shield of zebra skin. “I will go with you,” he says.
    â€œNo,” she commands. “Stay here.”
    The courtyard is sunk in darkness; her torch lights only a small circle around her, and then it sizzles in the violent downpour and goes out entirely. She likes the odd sensation of the cool wet hitting her skin, sliding in rivulets down her face, drenching her night robe. Her bare feet slap against puddles, something she has never experienced before.
    At the next flicker of lightning, she sees him. He is walking from the main storeroom’s entrance and stops not ten paces away from her next to an empty cart, its horse traces on the ground.
    â€œI have just stored the last baskets,” he says as rain streams down his face. His tunic is ripped and dirty, molded to his muscular body, and his wet hair is darker now, more the color of new bronze than gold, and stuck to his head. “The silos’ straw roofs are incinerated. The clay walls are blasted away. You would have had no grain to plant for the upcoming season.”
    She heaves a sigh, considering how to thank this strange man. As she steps toward him, a sharp pain radiates from the tender instep of her right foot up through her entire leg. Uttering a cry, she bends over to look at it, praying it is not a scorpion. But no. She has stepped on a broken roof tile thrown down by the storm, and it is still stuck in her foot. She winces and lets out a small moan. Blood pours from the wound—it must be very deep—and the pain is unbearable.
    Brehan has seen the blood. Without hesitation, he picks her up as though she were another basket of grain and not a princess, and she cries out again, this time in surprise rather than pain.
    â€œWhat are you—I—stop!” she says.
    He carries her to the columned portico, where he sets her gently down and kneels in front of her.
    â€œThis is—you must call for the physician,”