Scarlet in the Snow by Sophie Masson Read Free Book Online Page A

shaking and the panic leaving me until gradually I became calmer. I must have fallen asleep, for when I woke next bright sunlight was flooding the room.
    I got up and padded to the window in my bare feet. The curtains had been drawn and there was a tray of hot tea and appetising little pastries on the dressing table. Outside, the sun was shining brightly though snow still lay on the ground. It was very quiet; there were no bird calls, which wasn’t surprising, as they hardly stir in the wintertime. In the distance, beyond the lawns, I could see the hedge towering high into the sky, and a figure patrolling its edge, up and down, up and down, like a tiger in a cage. The
abartyen
.
    I quickly drew away from the window, in case he should look up and see me. In an ordinary place, at that distance, of course he could never have seen me. But this place was far from ordinary and I felt as if anything could happen here – anything at all.

I had some tea and pastries, and after washing and dressing in a plain green dress, I prowled around my room, trying to work out something – anything – from my surroundings. Nothing told me much though, apart from the books on the shelf. By now I was used to the idea that things had been arranged in this room specially for me, so it was with some surprise that I discovered the books were not the kind I liked to read. There was no fiction, no poetry, no plays, only a six-volume encyclopedia and a battered Ruvenyan–Faustinian dictionary. If I was desperately bored, I thought, I could read the encyclopedia, but when I flipped through it, I discovered it was full of endless reams of dull information on obscure subjects. Even the biographical entries were boring; I didn’t recognise a single name and the style was so long-winded that my heart sank and my eyes glazed over just looking at it. Only the dictionary held a marginal interestfor me, because at least it was about words. I wondered whether the accent of my unlikely hosts was Faustinian. They didn’t sound like my old tutor but they could have come from a different part of that powerful empire to our west, with its many different principalities and dukedoms.
    And then, with a prickle of excitement, I remembered that magic was banned in the Faustine Empire, except for that under the control of an official order called the Mancers. That was why our old neighbour Dr ter Zhaber had fled to Ruvenya when he was young. Could the
abartyen
and Luel be Faustinian refugees too? Was that the ‘terrible injustice’ Luel had mentioned?
    Driven by a sense that I might at last be on the verge of shedding some light on the mystery – a mystery I knew I had to solve if I was ever to get out of here – I leafed feverishly through all the books again, in the hopes of finding a clue.
    My efforts were in vain. I put the books back on the shelf and sat at the desk to compose a letter to Mama. But the lying words I needed to soothe her wouldn’t come, and my spirit of invention seemed to have failed me. Then I had an idea. I decided to write down the facts first – the truth of what had happened to me – and not what I had to tell Mama. So I took out the notebook, opened it to the first page and began to write. But though I tried to start recounting my experiences, I couldn’t find the right words. I started something, crossed it out, started again, to no avail.
    This was a new experience for me. I’d always been able to write fluently, easily, ‘too easily’ as another of our tutors said to me once, but then, she also thought that imaginationwas a character flaw that must be eradicated. Thank goodness she didn’t last long. My father heard her say that if we were her daughters, she’d make sure all frivolous pastimes were banned. ‘You are not their mother, thank God,’ he’d told her tartly, ‘and if you don’t approve of our family, there’s always the door.’ Which she took, in high dudgeon, while my sisters and I happily watched from the