Seventh Bride Read Online Free PDF

say something or strangle on it.  
    “Nor do I,” said her father.  
    Rhea sagged a little. He didn’t like it. He knew it was wrong. And yet they were still walking together to the spring, because even though her father was one of the most important men in the village, Lord Crevan was a noble, and that was that.
    They reached the spring. It was not particularly impressive at this time of year, a dull little seep over the stones. In damper seasons, it was covered in moss, but now the outer edges of moss had gone dry and baked in the heat.  
    On the north side of the spring was the wild wood.  
    There is a road, Lord Crevan had said.  
    Rhea didn’t see anything but woods.
    Is this going to be magic? Oh Lady of Stones, I bet it is…
    She walked towards the wild wood, aware that her father was standing beside the spring, wondering what she would do if there wasn’t a road. Could she go home? Maybe she could. If Lord Crevan showed up again, she could just say that she’d looked, and there wasn’t a road, and it wasn’t like she could crash through the wild wood at night and—
    There wasn’t a road.
    There was a path.
    It didn’t look much bigger than a deer trail, the kind of track worn by animals coming to the spring to drink. Tree roots lay across it like coiled ropes. It definitely wasn’t a road. A road was something you drove carts and oxen down. You could ride a horse down a road. Lord Crevan couldn’t possibly ride his stupid pink horse down this little twisty track, but he expected her to follow it, a fact which struck Rhea as enormously unfair.  
    Her father came up beside her and looked down the deer trail. “Is that it?” he asked.
    “I guess,” said Rhea. “He said north of the spring.”
    “Well,” said her father doubtfully, “I suppose his hunting lodge could be in the woods there…” (Which was ridiculous, Rhea thought, because if a lord’s hunting lodge had been that close to the village, everybody would know about it, but she didn’t say it out loud because everything was awful enough already.)  
    He hugged her. “Be careful,” he whispered, as if he didn’t dare say it aloud. And then, miserably, “I’m sorry.”
    Rhea hated Crevan in that moment, not for forcing her to marry him, which was bad enough, but for doing this to her father. Her father was a good man. He was a good miller, and he kept Aunt from cheating the farmers, and he donated money to the church, and when the barn cat had kittens, he never drowned any of them. He didn’t deserve to have some noble come stomping in and putting him in this position.  
    But here they were. And if she went, it might be bad, but if she didn’t go, it would definitely be bad. For all of them.  
    Rhea took a deep breath.  
    “I should go,” she said, and her father nodded. She stepped into the deer trail, putting up an arm to fend off the branches that reached for her eyes.  
    She wanted to look back at him, but it was dark immediately and she had to feel her way forward in blackness. She had to go one step at a time, planting one foot and then feeling forward with the other one. The roots were humped and tangled and seemed to heave under her feet, and the branches clawed at her.  
    Something ran across the back of her hand and she shrieked and shook her arm, and the branch she’d been holding back whipped around and smacked her across the forehead.  
    Now she was really mad.  
    Rhea snarled, stomping forward, not caring if she fell down and scraped her shins on the roots. She wanted out, out, out!
    And then the trees opened up around her, and the white road spread before her, gleaming like bone in the moonlight.  

CHAPTER SIX

    The road was white. It was edged with a few feet of brittle grass and then the grass turned into the dense tangle of the wild wood. The road itself was as clear as heartbreak.
    Rhea turned around and saw that the road ran behind her as well, apparently to the clearing with the spring. Her