Elves and Escapades (Scholars and Sorcery Book 2) by Eleanor Beresford Read Free Book Online Page B

“He’s just memorising her taste for when he rips her to threads and devours her.” We ignore him.
    The holidays are just as glorious as I’d hoped. It rains and sleets—no lovely drifts of snow—but we make the most of every clear moment we can. We’re on pegasus-back every moment we can manage, braving the shattering cold, with rucksacks full of hot coffee and soup to ward off chills. Rosalind is as glorious in the air as she is on a unicorn, daring and fearless, racing my brothers and sisters over the treetops. Once or twice, she actually shouts with delight. She volunteers to help out with the stables, too, quickly learning the names and tastes of all my Father’s precious breeding stock, lending a hand with mucking out and grooming.  
    I’ve never seen her elfin face so vivid with colour as in these frigid days, surrounded by the warmth of my family and our beasts. It reinforces my desire to make sure my brother brings her home for good, one of these days.  
    The colder days and our evenings are spent reading in front of roaring fires, toffee making in the kitchen, playing games and piecing together jigsaw puzzles and exchanging visits with the neighbouring houses. My parents don’t believe in letting children home for the holidays fall back on their own devices, for fear of mischief, even when we are on the verge of being grown up. I don’t mind. I’d far rather play word games, dreadful as I am at them, and let my little siblings laugh at me, than have lessons and prefect duties forever hanging over me. I glory in the free hours.
    I’m pleased to see the attitude my older brothers take to Rosalind. The don’t chaff her like they do me and my other friends, treating her with a kind of chivalrous gentleness, as if she’s made of china. Harry is particularly solicitous, carrying things for her and checking that she’s warm enough. When I charge him with it, he grins at me.
    “What you’re forgetting, Charles, is that Rosalind is a real girl.” I stick my tongue out at him, secretly pleased.
    I’ve kept to my plans to encourage Rosalind to look more grown up. It helps that she’s out of uniform. She has what even I can tell are really lovely and flattering clothes. Even her riding kit is beautifully cut rather than simply serviceable like mine, although I have no idea if the exquisite taste is hers or her mother’s. She seems bewildered and pleased when I start insisting on doing her hair. I’m better at it than I expected, for a girl who never cared over much for her own. After all, many are the mane and tail I’ve made look pretty for gymkhanas. Human hair isn’t very different.
    “You have such beautiful hair,” I tell her, pausing in brushing to lift the silky weight in my hands. It runs through my fingers like water, all in softly glowing greyish waves. I could touch it forever.
    “It’s queer looking,” she says, frowning a little. “Like an old lady.”
    “It’s perfectly lovely.” I brush it back from her face and secure it with slides. “More like a unicorn’s tail than ordinary hair. You should be proud of it.”
    “Yours is nice, too. Such gorgeous curls. I wish my hair curled like that.”
    “Don’t you start with me. Mother is always telling me it’s a waste to crop it off. She doesn’t need an ally.”
    “I won’t. I like it the way you wear it. It suits you, especially when you wear a ribbon.” She smiles at me in the mirror in a way that makes me feel almost pretty, for a moment. I’m too aware, though, of the contrast between us in the mirror, one girl delicate and silvery and feminine, the other tall and clumsy and tomboyish.
    It doesn’t matter. After all, I’m making her hair pretty for Harry’s sake, not mine.  
    It worries me a little that, although my Harry and my other older brothers obviously like her, she seems to take them in a friendly, natural way, much as Cecily does, although more shyly. The one boy she seems to have attached to most is