The Dark Remains Read Online Free PDF Page A

with a grin.
    A guardsman bowed to them as they approached the door to the queen’s chamber.
    “You may enter, my ladies,” he said.
    Aryn and Lirith exchanged quick looks, their mirth vanishing as they stepped through the door.
    “Such disobedience is not to be tolerated,” said a voice as clear and hard as diamonds.
    Aryn froze. Was the queen not even going to greet them before chastising them? A hasty apology rose in her throat, but before she could open her mouth a voice spoke sharply in her mind.
    Quiet, sister. Do not confess your crime when you have not been asked. It is not to us the queen speaks
.
    Aryn bit her tongue. She still hadn’t gotten used to Lirith’s ability to speak without words. It was not a skill Aryn had mastered herself. However, her shock was replaced by relief as she saw that Lirith was right.
    The queen’s antechamber was a spacious room, lined on one side by high windows that caught the reflection of the rising moon in a hundred small panes. Queen Ivalaine stood in the center of the chamber, towering over a slight young man who hung his head, his long, black hair concealing his visage. Beside him, her expression at once stern and motherly, stood Lady Tressa, the queen’s plump, pretty, red-haired counselor. It was the young man who had been the focus of the queen’s hard words.
    “You were forbidden to enter the stables again,” the queen continued, her words precise as arrows, “yet you did so today, and by your pranks caused such agitation among the horses that one broke her halter and escaped. And in regaining her, one of the stableboys fell and broke his arm.”
    “So I’m to blame for clumsy stableboys?” the young man said without raising his head. He was clad all in black, from tunic to boots.
    The queen went visibly rigid. “It is not blame that matters to nobility, Lord Teravian. It is responsibility. Your actions gave cause to this injury. Will you not accept fault?”
    The young man did not reply.
    “Then I have no choice but to take the fault upon myself,” Ivalaine said, “for you are my responsibility. This is what it means to be a ruler. Lady Tressa, see to it that the stableboy and his family are duly compensated from my treasury.”
    Tressa nodded, then bent to make a note on a parchment resting on a small table.
    Ivalaine shook her head. “What shall I tell your father of this?”
    Now the young man looked up, his hair falling back from the pale oval of his face. His features were fine, almost pretty, his eyes like emeralds beneath raven brows.
    “And why tell King Boreas anything?” he said, a sneer twisting the soft line of his mouth. “I know he sent me here so he could forget about me.”
    “You know nothing,” the queen said, her visage so icy that the young man took a step back, as if rethinking his insolence.
    “May I go now, Your Majesty?” he said finally.
    “I think you had best.”
    The young man gave a curt bow, then turned and—with the litheness of a dancer—moved to the door. He did not even glance at Aryn and Lirith as he departed.
    Aryn watched him go. She remembered Teravian well from her first years in Calavere. Back then, King Boreas’s only son had been a sullen, ill-tempered boy four years her younger. He had little to do with Aryn aside from occasionally tormenting her with pranks, such as the time he filled one of her bed pillows with wriggling mice.
    Then, two years ago, Boreas had sent Teravian to Artolor. It was the custom for royal children to be fostered at a foreign court; this was one way alliances between Dominions were forged and maintained. Aryn remembered that Teravian had thrown fits the day he learned he was to be sent away, but she had heard little of him since that time.
    A few days after their arrival in Ar-tolor, she had sought Teravian out, to greet him as a cousin. However, when she came upon him in the castle’s orchard, he had not come down from the top of a wall where he sat, and he had said nothing to