The Faerie Path Read Online Free PDF Page B

worlds
    Daughter last of daughters seven
    With her true love by her side
    Honest hand in true love given
    Anita had no idea what the words meant, but they sounded Shakespearean.
    She felt strangely distracted and remote from reality. “I must be dreaming again,” she murmured. “Just like last night.”
    Smiling, she turned the page.
    There was more writing. A lot more.
    On this day was born Princess Tania, the seventh daughter of our glorious King Oberon and our blessed Queen Titania. And the bells rang out throughout the Realm at the joyful news.
    It sounded like a fairy story, yet it was written in archaic, flowery language that a child would struggle to understand. A fairy story for grown-ups, perhaps?
    Frowning, Anita read on. There were long descriptions of celebrations and visits by important people and endless domestic details about the first few days of the baby’s life. The writing began to swim in front of her eyes. Anita yawned and her hand slipped off the book. She was shaken back into wakefulness as the pages began to turn on their own. As she watched, her eyes wide in alarm, the book settled into stillness a few dozen pages on, where a new chapter started.
    Upon the eve of her sixteenth birthday, Princess Tania prepared herself for her marriage to the young Lord GabrielDrake of Caer Liel in Weir. She was glad and joyful, for he was high-born and handsome and filled with grace.
    That sounded more interesting. Anita settled back in the bunched-up pillows and began to read.
    On the night before her wedding day, Princess Tania’s bed was strewn with rose petals and with perfumes of sandalwood and evening primrose, so that her dreams should be blessed and sweet. Then she was left alone to sleep one final time in the bedchamber she had known since childhood.
    Anita smiled as she read the description of Tania sitting up in her massive four-poster bed, holding a red rose that her fiancé had given her, and gazing happily out of her casement window at the full moon.
    And in the quiet hour before midnight, there came upon Princess Tania’s door a soft knocking. Princess Tania bade the person to enter. It was her sister Princess Rathina, come to spend a few last moments with her. They spoke together and made merry, but their bliss was destroyed when Princess Tania all of a sudden vanished without trace from her bedchamber.
    Anita blinked in surprise. She went back and read that section a second time just to make sure she hadn’t misunderstood.
    No, Princess Tania had definitely vanished.
    Princess Rathina was greatly distressed at the disappearance of her beloved sister, and she ran from room to room of the Royal Apartments, awaking everyone with her cries. Soon all the palace was astir and word spread from chamber to chamber, from tower to tower, from battlement to battlement, even to the most far-flung regions ofthe Great Palace—Princess Tania was lost.
    Anita turned the page.
    And at dawn the next day, the day that should have been his wedding day, the youthful Lord Drake knelt before King Oberon and made a vow that he would not cease searching for his lost love, even if his quest took him seven times seventy years.
    And that was it. The story stopped dead halfway down the page. Anita turned the next page, and the next, and the next, but there was nothing else. The rest of the book was blank. She read the last paragraph again, wondering if she’d missed something.
    She looked up in surprise. A soft male voice had started to speak the words aloud as she was reading them. A gentle, murmuring voice that seemed to be coming from very close to her head.
    But there was no one there.
    “Who are you?” she whispered.
    There was no reply.
    “What’s happening?”
    Silence.
    “I’m not scared,” Anita said to the empty air. “I just want to know what’s going on.”
    A voice echoed her words. “What’s going on?”
    But it wasn’t the man’s voice; it was a brisk, lowered female voice, and it came from