A Little Fate by Nora Roberts Read Free Book Online Page B

tunic.”
    â€œYou’re going out again?”
    â€œYes. I felt eyes on me when I was at banquet. Eyes from above. Gwayne said there was a spy hole next to the minstrel’s gallery. I want a look. Would Lorcan station guards there during a feast? He seems too sure of himself to bother.”
    No, it had not been guards watching her, Aurora knew. It had been the grass-green eyes of her wolf. She needed to learn why he’d been there.
    â€œAnd I need to see how the castle is protected during the night.” She pulled on her tunic. “I have enough magic to go unnoticed if need be. Did you learn anything of use?” she asked as she strapped on her sword.
    â€œI learned that Owen went back and beat the stable hand after all.”
    Aurora’s mouth tightened. “I’m sorry for it.”
    â€œAnd that the stable hand is Thane, son of Brynn, whom Lorcan took as queen.”
    Aurora’s hands paused in the act of braiding her hair, and her eyes met Rhiann’s in the glass. “Brynn’s son is cast to the stables? And remains there? His father was a warrior who died in battle beside mine. His mother was my own mother’s handmaid. Yet their son grovels at Owen’s feet and grooms horses.”
    â€œHe was not yet four when Lorcan took the throne. Only a child.”
    â€œHe is not a child today.” She swirled on her cloak, drew up the hood. “Stay inside,” she ordered.
    She slipped out of the chamber, moved silently down the corridors toward the stairs. She drew on her magic to bring smoke into the air, blunt the guards’ senses as she hurried by them.
    She dashed up to the minstrel’s gallery and found the mechanism Gwayne had described for her to open the secret room beside it. Once inside, she approached the spy hole and looked down at the hall.
    It was nearly empty now, and servants were beginning to clear the remnants of the feast. The queen had retired, and all but the boldest ladies had followed suit. The laughter had taken on a raucous edge. She saw one of the courtiers slide his hand under the bodice of a woman’s gown and fondle her breast.
    She hadn’t been sheltered from the ways of men and women. The Travelers could be earthy, but there was always a respect and good nature. This, she thought, had neither.
    She turned away from it, and focused instead on the essence of what had been in the room before her.
    One that was human, she thought, and one that was not. Man and faerie-folk. But what had been their purpose?
    To find out, she followed the trail of that essence from the room and out of the castle. Into the night.
    There were guards posted on walls, at the gates, but to Aurora’s eyes they looked sleepy and dull. Even two hundred good men, she calculated, could take the castle if it was done swiftly and with help from inside. As she worked her way along the wall, she heard the snores of a guard sleeping on duty.
    Lorcan, she thought, took much for granted.
    She looked toward the south gate. It was there that Gwayne had fled with the queen on the night of the battle. Many brave men had lost their lives so that her mother could escape, so that she could be born.
    She would not forget it. And she would take nothing for granted.
    Her senses drew her toward the stables. She smelled the horses, heard them shifting in their stalls as she approached. Though she scented man as well—sweat and blood—she knew she wouldn’t find him there.
    She stopped to stroke her horse’s nose, to inspect the stall, and others. Whatever Thane was, he did his job here well. And lived poorly, she noted as she studied the tiny room that held his bedding, the stub of a candle, and a trunk of rough clothes.
    Following the diagram in her mind, she searched the floor for the trapdoor that led to the tunnels below thestables. One channel ran to the sea, she remembered, the other to the forest.
    It would be a good route to bring in her