The King's Blood Read Online Free PDF

again from tiny fingers, thudding to the floor. "What happened?"
    The right Matilda glanced back for a moment, but tried to haul back up the lamb carcass, the drippings coating her apron in a gory mess. Ciara grabbed a hold of the left Matilda. 7 Eyes sharpened by terror bored into her and all the girl could do was point and scream. Realizing she'd get no answers from the panic stricken hiding with the perishables, she stepped over the lamb carcass still lying on the floor and opened the door into the kitchen. Behind her, the right Matilda silently closed the door while the left once again propped up the mutton barricade.
    If she'd thought the larder was bad, the kitchen was ten times worse. But she was able to get more than just quiet sobs and blank stares. Everyone, in fact just about everyone she'd ever met or known to work beneath the stairs, was stuck in between flaming spits and boiling pots tucked in the hearth, babbling their bloody heads off.
    "I saw it, right through his neck!"
    "There's gots to be thousands of 'em!"
    "With big teeth, and big eyes, and a huge tonker!"
    That had to be mistress Danalean, about all she thought of were tonkers and bigger ones. But this got her nowhere.
    Standing up to her full height above the throng, Ciara cupped her hands over her mouth and shouted, "Will someone please tell me what's going on?!"
    For a second the entire kitchen fell silent. Everyone turned very cautiously, lest a dress go up in flames, to the infiltrator in their midst.
    She gulped quickly and tried to shrink back down, but the eyes followed that as well. Instinctively, she stepped back towards the lamb carcass, as eyes surveyed her shoes still coated in meat juices.
    "He's dead! The King's dead!" a girl, not much older than Ciara burst into the kitchen. She didn't recognize her but the trappings suggested a handmaiden, probably one of the Queens who got lost in the maze of hallways and lucked out. Scepticar save the rest.
    "It was them monsters, the ones with the unblinking eyes!" the chef called out from deep in the walls, wedged somewhere behind the flue.  
    "No, they was men. Unholy men, who the Underlord turned their arms to blades."
    "I keep telling you, it was a dragon. A giant dragon stormed the hall and chewed the knights to pieces."
    "Ain't no such thing as a dragon, no more."
    The woman, old enough to have grandchildren, turned on her challenger and shoved the girl hard. "Are you calling me a liar?"  
    "If the girdle fits!"
    At this point a fight would have broken out if either had enough room to pull a fist back and do anything but glare while mumbling, "Why I oughta!"  
    Ciara covered her ears with her hands, a headache already threatening with the echoing cacophony of conflicting stories. She needed to think, and the only way to think was away from the brain drain. There were only two ways out of the kitchen. One was past the sea of servants who, only by the strength of Scepticar, would she be able to part and led straight to the great hall.
    Turning to her left, she fumbled around baskets half full of apples left by a witch beginning to regret her orchard purchase to take out one measly stepdaughter. Tossing the rotting fruit into the hearth, the green orbs bounded into the hissing fire releasing a strange red mist as each ignited. Her fingers dug around the edges of a door caked in soot and the black bits you can never get off the stovetop no matter how hard you scrub.
    Putting her shoulder into it, she popped the door open and raced up a set of stairs lain empty because they led directly to the haunted apartments. Back when the Castle was a far more bustling place, before the Albrant's hit a bit of a bad patch investing in the wrong wars, the entire wing of the castle served to house the servants. Most stacked three to a bed if they were lucky.
    But as plague, calls to battle, and Dunner princes promising them unlimited wealth if they just "send a few hundred coins to secure a cart" claimed the