The Queen's Bastard Read Online Free PDF Page A

noticed, his contemplation of her thoughtful and interested, but he said nothing. Belinda took silence as tacit permission, and continued. She learned to be unremarkable, if not wholly invisible, and slowly gained confidence in an ability to hide in shadows, if not disappear into them entirely.
    Even now, her forehead numbing against the cold pane of glass, Belinda reached for the ability that had enveloped her just one time, three years earlier. The duvet around her shoulders held her safe in its warmth; the glass held her safe from the plummet to the earth, but shadows would not enfold her in their safety.
    You are waiting,
a voice inside her whispered, and she knew it to be true. Waiting for a sticking point, for a moment of culmination that would explain the solitary, focused studies of her almost twelve years of life. It felt like standing on a knife’s edge, fathomless depths below her and impatience prodding her on. There was purpose there somewhere; Robert would not otherwise have troubled himself with the cost of her eclectic education.
    Lately she had realised that girls were not taught the things she had been taught; they did not study the blade, or learn politics and history. Rather, their days were filled with learning embroidery and managing households. Belinda had learned those things, too, but her math went beyond the numbers to balance the manor books, and her languages, written and spoken both, were numerous. Robert had purpose in educating her. Belinda only waited to learn what it was.
    Lamplight glittered on the road beyond the manor walls. Belinda blinked twice, hardly realizing her eyes had been open, then knelt up to peer through a windowpane unstained by fog from her breath.
    Light flashed again, then spread out more broadly as a distant corner was rounded and Robert’s carriage, black against shallow snow and starlight, came into view. Protected lanterns, glassed-over and swinging wildly, made streaks of brilliance to Belinda’s dazzled eyes as the carriage came pell-mell for the gate, horses’ breath steaming in clouds as they galloped.
    Belinda slid from her window, throwing her duvet off as she ran for the door. “The gate! The gate! Papa is coming! Open the gate!” Alarmed and startled voices, rough with sleep, took up her cry. Belinda, clutching a pair of fur-lined slippers in one hand, raced down the steps to the great hall behind Marshall, the thick-bodied manservant who tended to Robert when he visited his country estate. Heedless of the icy ground outside, Marshall flung open the broad manor doors and ran through slush, his booming voice rousing the stablehands from their roost. Belinda, more prudent, hopped and shoved her feet into slippers as she reached the main floor, then ran past Marshall through the courtyard.
    It was she who scrambled up to the heavy gates and pulled the pins that kept them locked at night, and she who put her feet through the iron bars and rode the swing of the gate as it opened. She waved through the bars, then climbed higher on the gate, standing on the cross-bars halfway up. Her fingers and cheeks were numb with cold where she pressed against the iron, hanging on with one hand and waving with the other. Her breath came in short, hard gasps, heart hammering inside her with an excitement that bordered on pain. The air she drank down was no longer bitter with cold, but burning with hope. For the moment, Belinda forgot stillness, and prayed.
    Robert, lit by the frantically swinging carriage lamps, leaned out a window, laughing and waving in return. “Pack!” he bellowed over the carriage’s rattle and the horses’ hooves. “Take yourself off the gate, and pack, girl!”
    Belinda touched Robert’s outstretched fingers as the carriage thundered by, the coachman calling out to the horses as he reined them in. The touch was hard enough to be painful, her cold fingers aching with the impact, but Belinda savored it, drinking in the ache the same way she relished