The Drowned Tomb (The Changeling Series Book 2) Read Online Free PDF

bright sun. The lake was laid out before him, a bright glittering disc under the blue sky, enclosed on all sides by the dense forest. Two odd and weathered stone totem poles lay at the end of the path just before the shingle, marking the boundaries of Erlking’s reach. Henry hadn’t been exaggerating about the lake. It was large and beautiful. Here in high summer, the expanse of water shimmered in its own mirage-light. A secluded oasis in the lush green woods. Off, in the middle of the green-blue water, there jutted the irregular hump of a small mossy island, shaded in thick trees. Robin knew that there was some kind of ruin out there nestled in the overgrowth, a ‘folly’. Henry had told him all about it. Just another of Erlking’s many oddities. Grey-black stones poking through bare branches like a jumble of broken mossy teeth. It was utterly hidden, lost behind a veil of bushy trees. The island itself seemed misty and bluish in the haze.
    The lake looked sparkling and cold. It made Robin want to kick his trainers off and step out into the inviting water, cooling his blood in the baking heat. Only the slight worry about drowning horribly stopped him.
    Robin halted in his tracks, his feet crunching in the gravel at the lake’s lapping edge. A tall slender woman was standing out on the water’s surface like some pale vision from King Arthur’s legends.
    The woman was some distance from the shore, standing perfectly still like a pale ghost, halfway between him and the island with its creeper-covered ruins. She was wrapped in a long silvery blue dress which curled and twined around her sinuously, a ceaseless ripple of movement which shone in the sunlight. Her skin was milky-pale and her long hair was so fair it seemed almost translucent, floating around her shoulders.
    They stared at one another for a moment, the distant woman and Robin, regarding each other wordlessly across the glittering expanse. It was, Robin felt, a surreal moment.
    As he stared, disbelieving, she began to walk towards him, her movements slow, fluid and graceful, stepping languidly as though the lake were composed of smooth solid glass rather than liquid water.
    Robin, unsure of what to do in such a situation, did nothing. He waited, feeling rather awkward and self-conscious as the ethereal woman made her slow and steady way toward him. Her eyes, which were a very calm deep green, never left his for an instant. His seraphinite mana stone beat against his chest beneath his t-shirt, like a deep second heartbeat. Whoever this lady was, besides being the single most beautiful woman he had ever laid eyes on, she was powerful, and her mana flowed before her in waves, echoing in the stone on his chest. Her energy pushed towards him like an invisible fog bank rolling off the lake.
    As she finally reached the shore before him, Robin glanced down at her feet, which were bare and just visible beneath her shimmering dress, and saw that each time she placed a foot on the water’s surface, frost and ice gathered and appeared beneath her. She wasn’t walking on the surface of the water at all; she was somehow turning the water beneath her into tiny icebergs and using them like stepping stones. They melted away behind her as soon as she lifted her foot from them.
    When she was standing right before him he looked up, realising just how very tall she was. She was taller that Aunt Irene even.
    “You are the Scion of the Arcania,” she said softly.
    “Um … yes,” Robin replied haltingly. “I’m Robin.”
    Her sleepy eyes, which were peering into his own as though she were trying to read the inside of the back of his head, seemed to focus at the sound of his voice, and she looked him up and down slowly, a thoughtful look on her tranquil face. It was as though she had been looking at someone or something else before he had spoken, and the sound of his voice has snapped her out of a daydream. She seemed to see him properly for the first time.
    “Robin,” she