The Mansions of Idumea (Book 3 Forest at the Edge series) Read Online Free PDF

Edge to do their
thieving for them.
    As Perrin peered hard into the concealing
shrubs around the expensive houses, he took little comfort in the
fact that Edge wasn’t the only village afflicted with raiding
teenagers; the same thing happened in every village on the outer
edges of the World.
    “Yoo-hoo!”
    Perrin cringed at the shrill voice.
    “I know that’s you, Hycymum’s son-in-law!
Over here!”
    And Perrin knew it was his mother-in-law’s
neighbor, again. The woman was frequently outside in the late
afternoon on sunny days, and he suspected she was watching for him.
He turned around, with his smile firmly in place, and nodded
politely to the elderly woman standing just ten paces away from him
but shouting as if he were one hundred. “Mrs. Reed. How are you,
today?”
    “Fine!” she bellowed back, oblivious to the
fact that not everyone was as hard as hearing as she thought they
were. “Just got back from my daughter’s! I’m two days early, but
she said I needed to get home to . . .” She squinted in thought. “I
don’t remember why she thought I should come home early.”
    Perrin’s smile turned painful. He could think
of a few reasons. “Well, then—glad you were able to return safely
from Moorland. I really need to be—”
    “Did you see the house?” she shouted eagerly
at him. “Going up just over there in the Estates? Much larger than
our little Cottages here, and Hycymum was saying just a few weeks
ago that you were thinking of moving—”
    “ She’s trying to move us , Mrs.
Reed,” Perrin said loudly, annunciating every word to, once and for
all, put an end to this move-into-something-bigger-and-richer
nonsense that his mother-in-law had recruited help with. “But we’re
not coming down here, understand?”
    She pointed a wrinkled little finger at him.
“But your mother and father were here last year, and I remember
them—”
    “—touring the Estates and trying to find
something they could coerce us into, yes, yes, yes, I remember. And
no, no, no Mrs. Reed—we’re not moving. Now, I really must go—”
    “Shall I find Hycymum for you?” she bellowed.
“Wait, she’s cooking at Edge’s Inn today, right? I need to cook
too,” she said, a hazy gloss coming over her eyes. “Your Shem Zenos
will be wanting cookies again . . .”
    Perrin’s brow furrowed in worry. Mrs. Reed
often flowed in and out of clarity, and the thought of her starting
a fire made him nervous. Usually her friends looked after her, but
he had passed Hycymum’s Herd—her group of a dozen biddies—oohing
and aahing at new hats in a window. They wouldn’t be back for some
time to notice that their neighbor had come home early.
    “Mrs. Reed, I think you should go in now and
have a nice lie-down. I’m sure your friends will bring you by some
cookies when they come back.”
    “Good idea, Lieutenant Corporal!” she called
cheerfully. “I missed my pillow. We have such good chats.”
    Perrin tipped his cap and made sure she shut
the door tightly behind her before he whirled his horse again.
    Little surprise she thought Shem would be by
for cookies, although lately he’d been bringing them to her.
Shem was every widow’s claimed son. He spent his days off at The
Cottages fixing their cabinets, building them shelves, and
listening to the same stories again and again. Little wonder he
couldn’t find an eligible woman to marry under age sixty: he had
his own harem of the hard-of-hearing.
    Perrin spurred his horse into a trot out of
The Cottages and into the grander Estates. As he passed the
enormous houses his parents and Hycymum wanted them to buy with all
the gold and silver hidden in their cellar, and a sneer formed on
his mouth. He nodded to one of the guards, a former sergeant of his
who sat in a little shack with his feet up and his sword down.
Small surprise that they rarely saw anything out of their tiny
windows. Throwing dices was always more entertaining, as if
practicing by himself would finally