The Hidden Queen Read Online Free PDF Page B

being secure and unchallenged in her exalted position, and from the natural disinterest and incomprehension bound to follow from the discrepancy in their age and sex. Before that, she had been too young. And now Sif held her life in his hands. His face was clean of expression, but his hands were tightly clenched at his sides; Fodrun could tell his self-possession was hard-won.
    It shattered without warning when they entered the queen’s private chambers, and Sif saw the woman laid out on the bed. He slid from tight-leashed composure into a blistering rage within the time it took to blink.
    “I wanted her alive!” Sif snarled, having paused aghast in the doorway. The guard who stood at the foot of the carved four-poster bed cringed.
    “She is, lord!” he had time to squeak, wincing in anticipation of a stinging blow across his face.
    The blow never landed. Sif had himself in hand. “Explain,” he said brusquely, and the naked edge of his voice was no less dangerous for having been sheathed in a brittle control.
    “Lord,” the soldier began warily, “somebody was here before us. The room was a mess…whoever was here might have been looking for something, but it looked as though she had not fought her assailant—perhaps she knew them—but by the time we got here they had already gone.”
    “Did you search the tower?”
    “Yes, lord, we did. But there were blood-spattered men everywhere. If some of that blood was the quee…was hers…we could not know.”
    Fodrun allowed himself a small grim smile at the man’s frantic attempt to retrieve his slip of the tongue. Sif would not want reminding of who had been queen in Miranei. And the guard’s clumsy reconstruction of events may not have been far from the mark. Rima may well have known who attacked her. What she may not have known when they entered her chambers was where their loyalties had been given.
    “She was wounded,” the guard was still babbling, “but she was not yet dead, and three of us came to see if we could help. But she had a knife, lord, one of those wretched small ones so damnably easy to hide, and if she had failed to fight the one who came to murder her, she certainly fought us, who came to help. She slashed at Radis’ face—and then Talin grabbed at her arm—he didn’t mean to break it, lord—and I…I pushed her away…and she fell…across that.” The fender he indicated ringed the hearth, and was delicately spiked. Some of the spikes, ornamental but deadly, were anointed with blood. There was more pooling by the hearth.
    They had lifted the half-swooning queen onto the bed, the guard explained, and tried to bind the worst of her hurts, but by the time Sif had arrived the bed was soaked with blood that seeped through their makeshift bandages. Rima lay still, her face a bloody mask; her eyes were closed, but she was still breathing, very shallowly. Fodrun, no stranger to death, saw it stamped on her brow; but it was no part of his soldier’s brief to see women laid out thus. He found himself feeling queasy. Part of the reason for this supplied itself a moment later when Sif asked the question Fodrun’s subconscious could not formulate.
    “And the girl? The princess?”
    “Some of the men are still searching, lord. She was not in her quarters, nor here. Perhaps she is hiding somewhere; or perhaps…”
    Yes. Perhaps somebody had already solved Sif’s dilemma for him. Perhaps whoever had tried to do away with the mother had succeeded where the child was concerned. Sif dismissed Anghara from his mind for a moment, crossing over to the bed and bending over Rima’s prone form. As though aware of his presence, her eyes flickered open. They were already filmed, glazing.
    Sif reached out and shook her, none too gently. “Who was it? Why attack you? Why now?” he demanded. “Where is Anghara?”
    She murmured something, and both Sif and the guard instinctively leaned closer to hear. “What was that?” said Sif impatiently.
    “She