Lord of Snow and Shadows by Sarah Ash Read Free Book Online Page B

maid, Dysis, ignored her. Ninusha and Ilsi, the other housemaids, were always flirting with Lord Volkh’s bodyguards, giggling over secrets together. . . .
    So Kiukiu spoke to the lord Drakhaon’s son. She knew that the boy in the portrait was Lord Volkh’s son Gavril and that he had been sent away before the Clan Wars, a few months before she was born. Which would make him about twenty years old, she reckoned on her fingers, as she was so nearly eighteen.
    “Why have you never come home, Lord Gavril,” she whispered, lovingly dusting the frame, “till now?”
    The painted sea shimmered blue, an achingly deep, beautiful blue. Kiukiu had never seen the sea, but if it was anything as blue as in the portrait, she thought she would never want to be anywhere else. If you stared for long enough, it seemed as if the painted water began to ripple, to move. . . .
    Kiukiu forced her eyes away, focusing on the boy’s face.
    “They say your mother wouldn’t let you come back.”
    The boy gazed silently back with his clear, sea-blue eyes.
    “Because of what Lord Volkh did to her.” Her voice was barely a whisper. Even though the lord Drakhaon was dead, she still feared him. And dead in such a horrible fashion, burned by an alchymical poison, slashed and stabbed till his blood soaked through the floorboards of the hall. . . .
    She shuddered. Best not to think of it.
    “Is that bed made up yet, Kiukiu?”
    Kiukiu started, startled by Sosia’s sharp voice from the corridor outside.
    “Nearly finished,” she lied, shaking open the crisp folds of fine, bleached linen. The chill, somber air of the bedchamber filled with the fragrance of summer-dried lemon balm as she spread the sheet on the mattress and carefully tucked in the corners. Then she plumped up the soft goose-feather quilt and arranged the pillows.
    A little door behind the brocade-canopied bed led to the Drakhaon’s dressing room and garderobe.
    Better leave some clean towels . . .
    Kiukiu slipped inside the little room. Here stood a vast armoire of dark-stained wood containing the Drakhaon’s clothes, dwarfing the washbowl and jug on its stand. What would become of all those fine linen shirts, those fur-lined winter jackets of black leather stitched with metallic thread, those rich brocade coats, trimmed with the softest velvet?
    Dead men’s clothes . . .
    Lord Gavril would never want to wear them, no matter how expensive the cloth. . . .
    Kiukiu carefully placed the towels by the washbowl and straightened up, catching sight of a fragment of her reflection in the full-length, gilt-framed glass mirror that stood behind the armoire, still draped in a dark cloth, a funeral custom of Azhkendir.
    She knew well enough the old stories told around the kitchen fire at night, superstitions about the souls of the departed. Stories that said the restless dead could use the shadows of their reflections in mirrors and glass to clothe themselves, could return to haunt the living.
    But Lord Volkh had been laid to rest in the Nagarian mausoleum with all the funerary rites due to a Drakhaon of Azhkendir. And Lord Gavril would be here by evening.
    Kiukiu whisked off the mourning cloth and folded it into fourths. She sneaked a glance at herself, and in case Sosia came in and caught her preening, gave the glass a perfunctory polish with the cloth.
    Did she really resemble her mother, long-dead Afimia? Whenever she asked Sosia, Sosia would nod and then let slip ambiguous little snippets such as, “Of course poor Fimia’s hair was so much lighter than yours . . .”
    But all Kiukiu could see in the mirror was a homely kind of face. Strong cheekbones, a broad brow, long, straight hair that was more wheaten gold than pale barley, plaited and tucked away beneath a bleached linen kerchief, and freckles. Try as she might to rub them away with herbal concoctions, they stubbornly remained, dusting her sun-browned skin like specks of golden pollen. No lady of quality had freckles. Lilias’