The Book of Earth Read Online Free PDF Page A

over the glazed rim of her tea bowl. “Well, couldn’t he just eat people?”
    “Of course not!” Alla set her own bowl down. “Where’d you get that idea, calfbrain? Dragons don’t eat people.”
    Erde nodded. Just what the Mage-Queen would have said. “Brother Guillemo says they do, least that’s what Fricca told me.”
    Alla’s smirk dismissed both Fricca and Brother Guillemo. “This priest talks about a lot of things he knows nothing about. But don’t you go telling
anyone
I said so. Now be off, starling, and ready yourself for the baronessa’s final ritual.”
    Erde’s grin fell away like a leaf in the wind. For a moment, safe in Alla’s little room, she had almost forgotten that her grandmama was dead.
    *   *   *
    Cold rain fell as the funeral procession wound down among the jutting rock ledges toward the alpine meadow where ten generations of von Altes slept the long sleep beneath rough-hewn granite slabs.
    The rain became sleet as the wind picked up. In the lead, the baron quickened his pace, though the broken scree was icy and treacherous underfoot and his gait was not particularly steady. The court lagged behind, but the thirty robed brothers tightened their cowls about their dark faces and urged the pallbearers onward, though their white-shrouded burden swayed precipitously atop its heavy wooden bier.
    Erde left off her searching for the real Guillemo among the hoods and robes and concentrated on keeping her balance. The guard captain Rainer paced beside her, his hand ready at her elbow.
    Rainer was from Duchen, a town far to the south. He’d come to Tor Alte as a motherless boy of seven, traveling with his father who was a courtier on the king’s business. Erde’s only memory of the man was a toddler’s misty vision of a tall figure dressed in red, for the same illness that claimed her mother took Rainer’s father soon after he arrived. Because the orphaned boy was mannerly and intelligent, the baroness took him into her service, but soon became fond of him, and raised him more like a younger son than a servant. Erde had grown up with Rainer, fighting and playing and sharing secrets as if he were the older brother she very much lacked.
    He had grown tall like his father, slim but strong and adept with his sword, and was now working too hard at thebusiness of being an adult to have much time for a younger sister. Though he made sure to pause when they met, to tease her a little and exchange a few words of gossip, Erde missed their giggling and chasing, and lately she sensed a new formality in him, an unacknowledged distance that puzzled and dismayed her. She suspected it was because she was just a girl and Rainer was newly made guard captain, upon her father’s succession. Just turned nineteen was a young age to have risen so high, so perhaps he had become overly full of himself.
    But not today. Glancing sidelong at his pale, solemn face, Erde was sure that the baroness’ death had grieved Rainer as much as it had her. She brushed sleet from her eyes. “If only it would go ahead and snow. Grandmama always loved a fresh fall of snow.”
    Rainer nodded wordlessly. He slipped off his heavy woolen cloak and draped it about her shoulders without asking, like the solicitous brother he’d once been. Erde’s own cloak was warm enough but she knew Rainer worried about people taking ill in the cold, never thinking to worry the same about himself. He was too thin, she decided, too taut across the cheekbones, as if the anxiety she often read in his eyes were absorbing his flesh from the inside. How is my father treating you, she wanted to ask, but now was not the time for conversation, nor this place, so grim and chill, the proper place.
    The grass was brown in the meadow, as shriveled as if summer had never happened. The granite marker waited to one side, the size and shape of a stable door, and as gray as the leaden sky. The grave was shallow, a mere depression in the mountain rock scraped bare