The Lost Queen Read Online Free PDF Page A

clock.
    It was three thirty. She spotted her phone lying on the carpet. Sitting on the edge of the bed, she retrieved it. She had one text message.
    It was from her best friend, Jade.
    YOU BAD GIRL ! WE WANT ALL THE GORY DETAILS! COME TO THE PIZZA PLACE AS SOON AS SCHOOL FINISHES !
    Tania smiled. Typical Jade. Word must have gone around the school saying she was okay, and now Jade wanted the inside story.
    Tania was suddenly eager to see her friends again, but…“Sorry, Jade,” she said aloud. “You don’t get toknow the truth this time.” She texted back: I’LL BE THERE .
    â€œWhat I really need right now is a shower,” she decided. As she stood up, she remembered the black amber stone. She fished it out of her pocket and walked to the desk. Sitting down, she took a sharp-pointed nail file out of a drawer. She held the thin stone between her finger and thumb on the desk and began to twist the nail file against its surface. After a few moments she saw that she had made a small circular dent. She worked for the next few minutes, drilling into the stone until she had made two small, neat holes, one at each end of the oval. Then she found a piece of lilac ribbon and threaded it through the holes.
    She tied the ribbon firmly around her wrist. She shook her hand a couple of times, making sure that the makeshift bracelet was secure. She picked a metal ruler out of a drawer and held it in her fist. She was aware of the faintest of buzzing in her fingers, as if a tiny fly was trapped in her hand. But that was all. She was safe.
    She got up and headed for the bathroom. She’d take a shower—and then it would be time to go and see Jade and the others.
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    Tania came back into her room, wrapped in a bath sheet and with her wet hair up in a towel turban.
    Apart from the fact that this was a Thursday and she ought to be at school, everything else around herwas beginning to feel disarmingly ordinary. The posters on her walls, the pile of schoolbooks by the desk, her possessions spread out around her just like they always had been. Her bulletin board with magazine pictures and postcards and old cinema tickets tacked all over it. A picture of her and Jade crammed into a photo booth, pulling faces. A photo of her and Edric—Evan then, of course—in Hyde Park, standing on a bench and making daft theatrical gestures, being Romeo and Juliet for Jade’s digital camera.
    This was reality. Faerie was…what? An illusion? No, not that. But not real—not in the way that this room was real.
    Except that she knew that it was.
    Almost without thinking about it, Tania made the simple side step that opened the door between the worlds.
    She let out a breath as her room melted silently away. Instead of the soft carpet, there were hard wooden boards under her bare feet. Instead of her bedroom she found herself staring at brown walls of smooth stonework. The room into which she had stepped was circular, with a low dark-beamed ceiling and a narrow, unglazed arched window that blazed with golden sunlight.
    â€œYou idiot!” she said aloud. “You were upstairs! You could have arrived here in midair!” She laughed at her good fortune: She had come into Faerie inside some kind of building, with a room on the same level as her bedroom in Camden.
    She knew from past experience that Faerie and the Mortal World replicated one another—almost as if they were two photographic images one on top of the other, sharing the same space but in quite different worlds. For her, stepping from one world to the other was as simple as moving from one room to another; it was her gift, and no one else in Faerie could do it without the use of powerful and dangerous enchantments.
    She padded over to the window. The scent of Faerie air filled her head, sweet as roses, strong as honeysuckle, mysterious as moonflower. Through a veil of slender leafy branches, she found herself gazing over the parkland that