The Born Queen Read Online Free PDF

nodded. “I’ll find them; they’re just another flight down. Maybe they even saw it. You go on back up.”
    She smiled. “Fine. I’ve a mind to undress again. Will you be joining me?”
    Stephen hesitated.
    She rolled her eyes. “We’ll find the Alq, Stephen. As you said, it’s been less than a month. You spent all last night reading. Spend another night so, and I’ll begin to doubt my charms.”
    “It’s just—it’s urgent. The Revesturi expect I can find the knowledge here to keep the world from ending. That’s a bit of a responsibility. And now this…intruder.”
    She smiled and partly opened her dressing gown.
    “Life is short,” she said. “You’ll find it. It’s your destiny. So come to bed.”
    Stephen felt his face burning.
    “I’ll be right up,” he said.
    L EOFF
    Leovigild Ackenzal eased back onto a cushion of warm clover and closed his eyes against the sun. He drew a deep breath of bloom-sweet air and let the solar heat press gently on him. His thoughts began to lose their sense as the dreams hiding in the green began to tiptoe into his head.
    A thaurnharp began sounding a delicate melody that blended with the birdsong and bee buzzes of the afternoon.
    “What tune is that?” a familiar voice softly asked, startling him.
    “She’s improvising,” he murmured.
    “It sounds a little sad.”
    “Yes,” he agreed. “Everything she plays these days is sad.”
    Warm, supple fingers wrapped around his own stiff and ruined digits. He opened his eyes and turned his head so that he could see Areana’s red-gold hair and dark-jeweled orbits.
    “I didn’t hear you come up,” he told her.
    “Bare feet don’t make much sound on clover, do they?”
    “Especially feet as dainty as yours,” he replied.
    “Oh, hush. You don’t have to win me anymore.”
    “On the contrary,” he said. “I’d like to win you again every day.”
    “Well, that’s nice,” she said. “Good husband talk. We’ll see if you feel that way in ten years as opposed to ten days.”
    “It’s my fondest wish to find out. And again in twenty, thirty—”
    She cupped her hand over his mouth. “Hush, I said.”
    She looked around the glade. “I’m going to start calling this your solar. You always want to be in the sunlight these days.”
    Don’t you?
he wanted to ask. She had spent months in the dungeons, just as he had. And just as he had, she had heard—
    No.
He didn’t want to remember.
    “I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean to remind you. I just—I wonder what you will do when winter comes.”
    He shrugged. “It’s not here yet, and I can’t stop it coming. We’ll see.”
    She smiled, but he felt it turn in him.
    “Maybe I can write a bright music.”
    “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’ve ruined your nap.”
    You have,
he thought, his bitterness growing.
And why carp about winter?
    “Still,” she went on, her tone changing, “all you do is nap, it seems.”
    He sat up, feeling his breath begin to fire. “How do you—”
    And then a bee stung him. The pain was very simple, very direct, and he found himself on his feet howling, swatting at the air, which was alive with the swarming insects.
    He understood now. The pain of the sting had wakened his sense.
    “Mery,” he shouted, striding toward the girl where she sat with her little thaurnharp.
    “Mery, quit that.”
    But she kept playing until Leoff reached down and stopped her hands. They felt cold.
    “Mery, it’s hurting us.”
    She didn’t look up at first but continued to study the keyboard.
    “It doesn’t hurt me,” she said.
    “I know,” he said softly.
    She looked up then, and his chest tightened.
    Mery was a slight girl; she looked younger than her eight winters. From a distance she might be five or six.
    But she wasn’t at a distance now. Her eyes had been azure when they had met. They were still blue, but they seemed filmed over somehow, sometimes vacant, sometimes sharp with subtle pain a child her age should not