Cobweb Forest (Cobweb Bride Trilogy) by Vera Nazarian Read Free Book Online Page B

are! Been waitin’ for you for hours! Can’t feel my arse from the cold!”
    Catrine stopped talking, took a big breath and let it out. She then folded her arms in satisfaction and looked around her with barely contained pride and excitement. Everyone was looking in rapt amazement, while Faeline, who already knew the events, just picked her grimy nails.
    Grial had been listening to the tale with interest as she bustled around the parlor adjusting furniture and closing shutters for the night. And now as soon as Catrine was done, she came to a stop in the middle of the room. There was something very unusual in Grial’s very dark eyes, and in her intense expression—more unusual even than her normal eccentric mannerisms.
    Grial looked at Catrine, then gazed around the room, and exhaled what felt like a long-held breath.
    “At last . . .” she said softly, and her face was transfigured.
    The seated girls looked up at her.
    “At last . . .” Grial repeated, this time in a louder voice. “It is done. At last my lips are unsealed .”
    “What do you mean, Grial?” Lizabette stared at the older woman, for some reason straining to see her, to see her strangely set-in-motion visage and her chameleon face with its familiar frizzy mane of unkempt hair. . . . Indeed, for a moment there, did it only seem so, but was it moving like snakes?
    But Grial was not to be properly seen, not any longer—for now she was changing before their eyes.
    The cheerful room around them, lit by a few candles, was suddenly thrown into deep shadow. And the nature of the light dimmed a few degrees from golden candle glow to cool silvery moonlight. There could be no moon indoors naturally, and indeed the window shutters have just been closed  . . . and yet it felt as if the moon was here— she rode the sky and somehow shone through the roof and ceiling of the little house, and filled the parlor with her cool radiance. . . .
    As this uncanny sense filled them all, Grial appeared to stand taller and straighter. And her patchwork dress with its filthy apron began to dissolve around her, to be replaced by a fine noble cloth of flowing darkness, a classic long chiton that came down in folds around the statuesque woman, to lie at her sandaled feet. Grial’s hair was now a perfect ordered crown of curls, symmetrical and severe. And her face was abysmally beautiful.
    The strangest thing was, she was still Grial, with her same ancient-young, very black, very wise eyes. The same intimate expression filled them, as she gifted each of the girls with her profound gaze.
    And yet she was now someone else.
    “Oh . . . Grial! ” whispered Lizabette.
    “You know me as Grial, and it is my mortal aspect,” said the familiar stranger. “I have taken the greatest Oath upon the sacred waters of the River Styx, to keep my silence and be diminished and live in the mortal world among you—until the reasons for the Oath are no longer. It has come to pass and it is done now, and my lips are unsealed at last, so that I may speak freely and resume my true aspect.”
    “What—who are you?” Niosta muttered, while Marie’s eyes opened wide and she started to tremble.
    “My beloved children, you may now know me as I truly am,” said the goddess. “I am immortal, and I preside over Crossroads and Choices and Doorways and all the things that linger Between. I am Hecate.”
     

     
     

Chapter 3
     
    A s Percy opened her eyes, she felt a powerful cold breeze and the contrast of sudden unseasonable brightness of the dawning sun on her cheeks. She held Beltain’s hand, as though he were her last anchor in the world, and he in turn squeezed her fingers tight, fighting a moment of vertigo. And she heard Jack’s startled neigh, as the great black warhorse was pulled along with them into whatever supernatural vortex that had brought them here.
    They found themselves in a strange place. Neither of them had ever seen the sea up close, but they recognized this