The Charnel Prince Read Online Free PDF

where her love, Roderick, must be giving up hope by now.
    Just a little water separating her from her rightful station and everything she loved, and yet that little bit of water was expensive to cross. Princess though she was, she was penniless. Nor could she tell anyone who she was, for she had come to z’Espino with terrible danger on her heels. She was safer as a washerwoman than as a princess.
    “You.” A man on a horse rode up the lane and sat looking down at her. She recognized by his square cap and yellow tunic that he was an
aidilo
, charged with keeping order in the streets.
    “Yes, casnar?”
    “Move along. Don’t tarry here,” he said brusquely.
    “I’ve just come from serving the casnara da Filialofia.”
    “Yes, and now you’re done, so you must go.”
    “I only wanted to look at the sea for a moment.”
    “Then look at it from the fish market,” he snapped. “Must I escort you there?”
    “No,” Anne said, “I’m going.”
    As she trudged down a lane bounded by stone walls topped with shards of broken glass to prevent climbing, she wondered if the servants who worked on her father’s country estates were treated so shabbily. Surely not.
    The lane debouched onto the Piato dachi Meddissos, a grand court of red brick bounded on one side by the three-story palace of the meddisso and his family. It wasn’t so grand as her father’s palace in Eslen, but it was quite striking, with its long colonnade and terrace gardens. On the other side of the piato stood the city temple, an elegant and very ancient-looking building of polished umber stone.
    The piato itself was a riot of color and life. Vendors with wooden carts and red caps hawked grilled lamb, fried fish, steamed mussels, candied figs, and roasted chestnuts. Pale-eyed Sefry, hooded and wrapped against the sun, sold ribbons and trifles, stockings, holy relics, and love potions from beneath colorful awnings. A troop of actors had cleared a space and were performing something involving sword fighting, a king with a dragon’s tail, Saint Mamres, Saint Bright, and Saint Loy. Two pipers and a woman with a hand-drum beat a fast melody.
    In the center of the piato, a stern-eyed statue of Saint Netuno wrestled two sea serpents, which twined about his body and spewed jets of water into a marble basin. A group of richly dressed young men lounged at the edge of the fountain, fondling their sword hilts and whistling at girls in gaudy dresses.
    She found Austra near the edge of the square, almost on the steps of the temple, sitting next to her bucket and scrub brush.
    Austra watched her approach and smiled. “Finished already?” Austra was fifteen, a year younger than Anne, and like Anne she wore a faded dress and a scarf to cover her hair. Most Vitellians were dark, with black hair, and the two girls stood out enough without advertising their gold and copper tresses. Fortunately, most women in Vitellio kept their heads covered in public.
    “In a manner of speaking,” Anne said.
    “Oh, I see. Again?”
    Anne sighed and sat down. “I try, truthfully I do. But it’s so difficult. I thought the coven had prepared me for anything, but—”
    “You shouldn’t have to do these things,” Austra said. “Let me work. You stay in the room.”
    “But if I don’t work, it will take us that much longer to earn our passage. It will give the men who are hunting us that much more time to find us.”
    “Maybe we should take our chances on the road.”
    “Cazio and z’Acatto say the roads are much too closely watched. Even the road officers are offering reward for me now.”
    Austra looked skeptical. “That doesn’t make sense. The men who tried to kill you at the coven were Hansan knights. What do they have to do with Vitellian road officers?”
    “I don’t know, and neither does Cazio.”
    “If that’s the case, won’t they be watching the ships, as well?”
    “Yes, but Cazio says he can find a captain who won’t ask questions or tell tales—if