The Hidden Queen Read Online Free PDF Page A

now the daughter of his love could easily fall beneath the onslaught of the son of his pride. And Rima was a frail enough barrier to raise between them. Yet—there was still one last thing she could do, one thing her Sight could do for her daughter.
    She left her room, and climbed the battlements facing south. There were several carts on the road from Miranei, folk fleeing the inevitable attack. One of them might well be the one carrying Dynan’s daughter away from his keep. In a last moment of full and free memory, Rima was deeply grateful for the numbers on that road; they would mask Anghara’s departure even more thoroughly than Rima could have hoped. Then she ruthlessly erased all traces of Anghara from her mind after the last bright vision of her daughter’s small face beneath Roisinan’s crown, deliberately left to torment Sif if he ever came close enough to Rima to question her. There was one small trigger, inaccessible to anyone but herself, that would restore her memory of Anghara’s sanctuary; but Sif could not get at it. Even if she survived his assault on Miranei long enough to become his prisoner, he would never be able to drag the secret from her. He could not force her to divulge what she no longer knew.
    Both were gone from her now, Dynan whom she had loved and the daughter for whom she fought even as she chose to forget her. There was a great yawning hollowness inside her, a longing that could never be met, part of a puzzle that could only be resolved when Sif arrived in Miranei and she, Rima, went to whatever fate that hour held for her.
    But now she was tired, empty. She crossed her arms upon the cold stone of Miranei’s ancient stone battlements and rested her chin on them, staring unblinkingly across the moors into the flat horizon, as if she could already see in her mind’s eye the dust raised by Dynan’s army. Sif’s army, coming to conquer. Roisinan’s army, death behind them, death before, coming to bring a new king to the keep under the mountains.

2
    I t was not that Sif had counted on having Miranei handed to him without a blow struck in anger, given his manner of having claimed its mastery, although it would have gratified him to have been welcomed there with acclamations. But neither did he expect the keep to hold out against him for so long. Even Rima had not realized the depth of the feelings that ran in the keep’s defenders. Faced with a horrifying choice, divided within itself, its people’s loyalties shredded in the storm of Sif’s coming like cobwebs in a high wind, Miranei was still the king’s keep and he that waited beyond it, for all the claims of his blood, was not yet the king. And what was the king’s was still within the walls, and would be defended. The garrison fought like men demented, even against those who rose up in Sif’s favor in its own ranks. Miranei suffered agonies of both body and soul, but it held out for the heiress of Red Dynan for almost ten days.
    Even then, Miranei’s gates were opened to Sif from within. Once in, the army’s superior numbers made short work of any remaining pockets of resistance. But the aftermath, the picture that met Sif’s eyes when he rode in to claim his city, was a swathe of blood and destruction. There were bodies in the courtyards, bodies hanging awkwardly from battlements. Torn, bloodied cloaks lay trampled underfoot; bright blood pooled on stairwells, left long, dull smears on walls. Those men who were still alive wandered about in a daze. A few recognized and greeted Sif according to the manner of their most recent feelings about him—some with a weary kind of joy, others, less subtle, simply turning tail and running for cover. There was an odd smell in the air, partly that of death, partly something more intangible, a smell, perhaps, of treachery, or regret. Someone had torched a grain storehouse and the fire hadn’t fully caught—the roof still smoldered dully, adding acrid, murky smoke to the already polluted