The Black King (Book 7) Read Online Free PDF Page A

could be dooming us all.”
    “Staying here will doom us all. I’m going to give us a fighting chance.”
    He leaned back, a grimace on his face. “And what if we fail?”
    “Then at least we’ve tried.” She took a step closer to him. “Coulter, I can’t feel anything in this body.”
    “I know. But I think I can find some way to fix that.”
    “I love you,” she said and his eyes widened. She hadn’t said that to him in fifteen years. “I want to be with you. I want to make love to you. I want to have children with you. I can’t do that like this. Please, Coulter. If I stay here, I lose everything. I even lose you.”
    His face had gone white. He apparently hadn’t realized what she meant, or how she felt. Or perhaps he hadn’t believed it. They had shared themselves more intimately than most people ever did. He had to know, on some level, that she was telling the truth.
    He swallowed, rubbed his face, then took a deep breath. “We need a plan,” he said.

 
     
     
     
    THREE
     
     
    BRIDGE TOOK the last bite of his lunch and sipped water from the tankard in front of him. The eating nook in the family suite was large and cold, but Bridge knew better than to complain. Arianna would taunt him as she had before. She thought him weak and stupid, and she wasn’t afraid to say so.
    Arianna sat across from him, her posture cool and regal. She rubbed at the birthmark on her chin as if it itched, then finished the last of her bread and cheese. She hadn’t said much to him all lunch and he knew that she was wondering where his daughter was.
    Lyndred hadn’t come to lunch or breakfast either. She had become more withdrawn the longer they spent at the palace. Bridge got the sense that his daughter was frightened of something, but she wouldn’t tell him what.
    One of the Islander servants bowed and refilled his water glass. Bridge had stopped drinking spirits here. He felt that he needed to keep his wits about him. As the weather had gotten worse, he started drinking more root tea, even though Arianna called it the beverage of peasants, just as his grandfather Rugad used to. Sometimes Bridge got the sense that Arianna was his grandfather come back to life.
    The very idea made him shudder. Rugad may have conquered more land than any other ruler, but he was an arrogant man who seemed to respect no one but himself.
    “You will tell me where Lyndred is before the day is out,” Arianna said. It wasn’t a request. It was a command.
    “I haven’t seen her,” Bridge said. “Perhaps the servants know.”
    “You haven’t even bothered to look for her? Perhaps she’s ill.” Arianna’s concern for Lyndred wasn’t unusual. Arianna seemed to have taken to the girl.
    “I don’t think she’s ill,” he said. “I think she probably wanted some privacy. Lyndred’s not used to life here on Blue Isle.”
    “Or in the palace,” Arianna said. “I suppose you raised her in that awful Bank of Nye.”
    He started. Arianna had never been off Blue Isle. There was no way she could have known that the Black Family’s palace on Nye had once been its central bank.
    She startled him like that daily. There were things Arianna should not know and yet did. Things about the family, phrases that Rugad used, histories that no one should have been able to impart to her. Her mother, Jewel, had died when Arianna was born and her father was an Islander. Arianna was raised by Islanders, not Fey, and yet she seemed to be the purest Fey Bridge had met.
    “I raised her in Nye, which was my mistake,” Bridge said. “Nye is a weak country with little to recommend it—”
    “I know. It always surprised me that you stayed there as long as you did.”
    “You told me to. I offered to come here when you became Queen, but you told me to stay in my position.”
    She raised her eyebrows slightly which he had grown to recognize as a sign of surprise. “And you listened to me?”
    But he knew that wasn’t what surprised her. She didn’t