Roses Read Online Free PDF Page A

index finger together firmly and tried to calm his beating chest. The maids’ stories flew into his mind and he swallowed hard. Gathering his courage, he peered over the half door once again.
    The child had buried her face against Comrade’s lean ebony leg, wrapping her silvery arms around his knee. She looked so vulnerable that any misgivings Owaine harbored ebbed. She was wearing a pair of slacks that did not fit and a frilled boy’s shirt with deep creases.
    “Don’t be frightened,” he said in the soothing lilt he reserved for skittish colts.
    She peeked at him with one curious violet eye.
    “I won’t hurt yur.”
    She stared at him.
    Owaine wandered back over to the carriage horses and began muttering a Hilland folk song. He picked up a currycomb and started working the knots out of the first horse’s tail.
    Winds of blight that tear the earth,
Rain that spills the rights of birth.
Gods that weave our spells divine,
Protect these ancient hills of mine.
    He heard a shuffle of straw and glanced over to see the child standing on the other side of Comrade’s stall. He had not even heard her slide the bolt and open the half door.
    “You remind me of Ma, girly,” he said. “She were yur size when I left, but I ’spose she’s bigger now.”
    The child stared at him and bit on her thumb.
    He turned his attention back to the knots and waited. From the corner of his eye he saw a pale shadow creep closer. A moment later, he looked over his shoulder and saw her standing a yard or so away, watching him closely. She had a dark purple bruise on her temple that looked tender and sore.
    “What happened there?”
    She recoiled from him with a whimper.
    “Hush, yur. Hush.”
    He moved back over to the carriage horse and carried on brushing. After a while he turned his head and saw her standing beside Comrade’s stall again, cradling the horse’s head in her arms and hugging his muzzle to her chest.
    “He’ll take any amount of that. Yur could stay there all day if yur please.”
    And she did. After that she came back whenever she could escape the nursery, keeping the horseman company while he worked.

C HAPTER F IVE
    The Circus
    I n the spring of her twenty-fourth season, the amethyst-eyed child learned how to escape Rose Herm’s grounds. Hitherto she had started to bolt the nursery on a daily basis, spending her time in the company of Owaine or prowling the vast, ornamented grounds of the mansion, climbing trees and playing solitary games in the punishing heat. Nan kept the child’s escapes a secret from the rest of the household, since her pride could not stand the tarnish of failure. Her place among the house servants was high; they feared her for her appearance and her reputation. They respected her for keeping that freakish being in check, and she enjoyed her elevated rank.
    But Nan had run out of punishments for the child. Smacking her no longer worked and neither did shouting or cursing. The child’s silver skin was riddled with deep, plum bruises from pinches and punches and kicks. Nan had told her that she was the scum of the realm so many times that it no longer had any effect. The child would stand and take it all with the most infuriating blank expression, and then the next day she would find some way ofescaping again. She climbed out of windows, created distractions and slipped through the door, stole keys, and hid. Nan was beginning to crack.
    The child took pains to avoid everyone except Owaine when she wandered about the grounds. She was old enough to realize that her appearance caused others shock and horror, so she snuck around like a pale shadow. For a while, her favorite pastime was to find a way into the drawing room and crouch under an armchair, watching the visitors Ma Dane had over for tea. This was how she learned words other than “wretch,” “monster,” and “demon.”
    She would crouch until her whole body was numb with inertia and stare at the exotic creatures that inhabited that