Huntress by Malinda Lo Read Free Book Online Page B

sleeping under the same roof. The last few days with them had been precious, though. She would see them in the morning once more, but she already missed them.
    She tried to relax; she knew she should get as much sleep as possible, because tomorrow would be a long day. But she was anxious and unsettled, and the palace was too grand to be comfortable. When she first arrived, she had stared wide-eyed at everything. She had never seen furniture as fine as the dark red lacquered armchairs and tables in these rooms; she had never slept in a bed as magnificent as this one, with a frame carved into the shapes of singing birds on branches. At night, there had been a phalanx of servants to bathe her in jasmine-scented water, and in the morning, more servants came to dress her in clothing so exquisite she was almost afraid wear it.
    But all the luxury in the palace did nothing to dull the sharp clarity of the emotions that gripped her every time she remembered her vision.
    Since the first time she had envisioned that beach of ice, she had seen it twice more in dreams. Each time she awoke feeling torn up with loss, the sight of Kaede departing as painful as a fresh wound. Tonight in the palace, she was still awake when the vision began to pull at her, like fingers gently tugging her toward a deep blue pool. Part of her did not want to go, but part of her experienced this tugging with a kind of intellectual detachment. She had never encountered this kind of Sight before; it was like there was someone or something leading her forward. It was not unpleasant or frightening; it was merely quietly insistent. She knew it would win eventually, and so she gave in, allowing her mind to open up to what it wanted to show her—and then she was there: standing on the beach as always, her feet planted on the snow, looking out at the boat that Kaede rowed away from the shore.
    For the first time, she sensed another person with her. She knew, somehow, that if she turned around, Con would be standing behind her. And she realized that she could feel some of what he was feeling: pain, physical pain, and beneath that a knotted rope of worry. He was moving toward her, and his fingers wrapped around her shoulder as if to restrain her. She saw Kaede leaving; her stomach twisted with dread. But this time there was more: a hot wash of guilt, spreading a bitter taste in her mouth.
    The Taisin lying beneath silk sheets in the palace twisted her body, curving it as though she were running after Kaede, but the one standing on the beach did not move beneath the press of Con’s hand. Instead she looked up, past Kaede’s receding figure, and there she saw something that took her breath away. In Cathair she gasped out loud, crumpling the sheets into her fisted hands. There before her in her mind’s eye was a fortress rising up from the frigid sea like a mountain of snow. It was as though an iceberg had been carved with a giant knife, shaped into towers and walls; and cut into those walls were glass windows that winked in the brilliant sunlight like a thousand sparkling diamonds.
    The fortress was on an island—or perhaps it was simply a particularly large ice floe—and Kaede was rowing toward it. Each stroke took her farther from the beach Taisin stood on, her feet growing colder by the second, and now she heard a sound for the first time: Con speaking in her ear, an urgent tone in his voice. Come back , he was saying to her. Come back.

    Taisin awoke well before dawn, the vision still clear in her mind, her nightgown soaked with sweat. She shivered; the silk sheets held no warmth. She sat up, shaking, and climbed down from the platform bed to retrieve her knapsack. She pulled it open and rifled through it in the dark until she found her woolen traveling cloak. It had been laundered by the palace servants, and now she wrapped it around herself, the scratchy fabric a welcome contrast to the cold silk.
    What had Con meant? Come back from what? The image of the ice