The Charnel Prince Read Online Free PDF Page A

won’t.”
    “You have good vision.”
    Neil nodded. “I will do as you command, Majesty. I will be ready by morning.”

CHAPTER TWO
z’Espino

     
    ANNE DARE, YOUNGEST daughter of the Emperor of Crotheny, Duchess of Rovy, knelt by a cistern and scrubbed clothes with raw and blistered hands. Her shoulders ached and her knees hurt, and the sun beat her like a golden hammer.
    Only a few yards away, children played in the cool shade of a grape arbor, and two ladies in gowns of silk brocade sat sipping wine. Anne’s own dress—a secondhand shift of cotton—hadn’t been washed in days. She sighed, wiped her brow, and made sure her red hair was secure beneath her scarf. She sneaked a longing glance at the two women and continued her work.
    She cast her mind away from her hands, a trick she was becoming quite adept at, and imagined herself back home, riding her horse Faster on the Sleeve or eating roasted quail and trout in green sauce, with gobs of fried apples and clotted cream for desert.
    Scrub, scrub, went her hands.
    She was imagining a cool bath when she suddenly felt a sharp pinch on her rump. She turned to find a boy about four or five years younger than she—perhaps thirteen—grinning as if he’d just told the best joke in the world.
    Anne slapped the clothes onto the scrubbing board and spun on him. “You horrible little beast!” she shouted. “You’ve no more manners than—!”
    She caught the women looking at her then, their faces hard.
    “He pinched me,” she explained. And just to be sure they understood, she pointed. “
There
. ”
    One of the women—a blue-eyed, black-haired casnara named da Filialofia—merely slitted her eyes. “Who exactly do you think you are?” she asked, her tone quite flat. “Who, by all the lords and ladies in earth and sky, do you think you are that you can speak to my son in such a manner?”
    “Wherever do you find such servants?” her companion Casnara dat Ospellina asked sourly.
    “But h-he—” Anne stuttered.
    “Be silent this instant, you little piece of foreign trash, or I will have Corhio the gardener beat you. And he will do quite more to you
there
than pinch it, I daresay. Forget not whom you serve, whose house you are in.”
    “A proper lady would raise her brat to have better manners,” Anne snapped.
    “And what would you know of that?” da Filialofia asked, crossing her arms. “What sort of manners do you imagine you were taught in whatever brothel or pigsty your mother abandoned you to? Certainly, you did not learn to mind your place.” Her chin tilted up. “Get out. Now.”
    Anne picked herself up from her kneeling position. “Very well,” she said, facing them squarely. She held out her hand.
    Da Filialofia laughed. “Surely you don’t think I’m going to pay you for insulting my house, do you? Leave, wretch. I’ve no idea why my husband hired you in the first place.” But then she cracked a faint smile that didn’t even hint at good humor. “Well, perhaps I do. He might have found you entertaining, in a barbaric sort of way. Were you?”
    For a long moment Anne was simply speechless, and for a moment longer she was poised between slapping the woman—which she knew
would
earn her a beating—and simply walking away.
    She didn’t quite do either. Instead she recalled something she had learned in her last week working at the triva.
    “Oh, no, he has no time for
me
,” she said sweetly. “He’s been much too busy with Casnara dat Ospellina.”
    And then she did walk away, smiling at the furious whispers that began behind her.
    The great estates lay on the north side of z’Espino, most of them overlooking the azure water of the Lier Sea. As Anne passed through the gate of the house, she stood for a moment in the shade of chestnut trees and gazed out across those foam-crested waters. North across them lay Liery, where her mother’s family ruled. North and east was Crotheny, where her father sat as king and emperor, and