The Night Dance Read Online Free PDF Page A

hair fanned around her incredibly delicate, breathtakingly beautiful features. A sigh escaped lips that seemed almost poised to speak. He felt a strong urge to go back and kiss them….
    In the next second he was once again on the bloody battlefield, sprawled on his side. Not another man stood. As he staggered to his feet, he saw Arthur, down but still moving, several feet away. He’d had the strange but certain feeling that this mysterious flight he’d somehow taken out of his body had saved his own life.
    Looking down now, he ran his good hand along Excalibur, which shone in the moonlight. His mindswam as it struggled to understand all that had just happened.
    Arthur, dead.
    The other knights of Camelot, slain.
    Surely this was the end of the world as he knew it.

C HAPTER F IVE
Eleanore the Observant
     
    “How was cooking class?” Eleanore asked pointedly when Rowena returned from her supposed cooking class yet again. She noticed the forked twig caught in the hem of Rowena’s cape, the half of a leaf snarled in her gorgeous hair, the dirt smudged on the back of her wrist.
    And with a glance at Rowena’s feet she saw that though her sister’s slippers were not dirty, her ankles were.
    Eleanore had long suspected that these cooking classes were a fraud, intended only to get her youngest sister out of spinning and embroidery. But the day before Rowena had actually been dirty when she returned. And now here it was again for the second day—signs that she’d somehow gone beyond the wall. Besides everything else, the girl was wet!
    Rain now pelted the window of the sewing room, and it was clear from her frizzled hair and damp cloak that Rowena had been out in it!
    Rowena settled on the cushions of the window seat, carefully arranging her wet cape at her side. She gazed out the window at the falling rain. It was ahabit both Eleanore, the eldest, and Rowena, the youngest—just minutes younger than Ashlynn—shared, this tendency to stare longingly out the window, lost in thought.
    How had she escaped the manor wall? How could she possibly have done it? Eleanore had to know.
    She, herself, burned to escape from this prison of a home. She read books; she knew she was too old to be unwed. Other women were mothers long before they were as old as she already was!
    Eleanore put down her embroidery hoop and crossed the room to Rowena. “Rowena, are you feeling well?” she asked softly.
    Rowena shivered and turned away from the window. “Oh, you startled me,” she said.
    “I see that,” Eleanore commented, sitting beside her on the window seat. “I asked if you were well because I noticed a distant gaze in your eyes.”
    Rowena straightened and seemed to force herself back from the daydream with which she’d been involved. A too bright smile formed on her lips. “I’m quite well, thank you. I was thinking about…cooking.”
    “Cooking…” Eleanore repeated, bristling inwardly at what she was certain was a bold-faced lie. “And how was the lesson?”
    “Fine.”
    “What did you learn to make?”
    Rowena blinked at her blankly as if she couldn’t make sense of Eleanore’s question. “Um…pheasant,” she blurted after a moment.
    “Did you kill it yourself?” Eleanore probed.
    Rowena’s nose wrinkled in an involuntary reaction of disgust. “Of course,” she answered. “It was caged outside with the geese,” she added. “I had to go out and get it. It struggled and almost got away. That’s how I got so wet.”
    Eleanore observed her with a mixture of annoyance and admiration. Rowena had anticipated Eleanore’s next suspicious question and answered it before it was asked. Well, Rowena would not put her off that easily. “Then why are your slippers dry though the rest of you is wet?”
    “I removed them for fear of ruining them.”
    “Did the new kitchen servant show you how to kill the pheasant?” Eleanore pressed, undeterred.
    Rowena cast a blank, uncomprehending stare at her.
    “You’ve spent so