The Book of a Thousand Days by Shannon Hale Read Free Book Online Page A

than most. We wrote letters for years. I told my maid Oara what to say and she wrote for me. Oara was my best friend. When my father condemned me to this tower, she ran away."
    My lady's eyes were empty as she spoke. I shivered, imagining being a child in that large house with floor stones that look to be cut from ice instead of passing winter nights in a snug gher. To be raised by a fierce lord who slaps instead of by a mama who sings.
    This was the most my lady had ever confided in me, and I longed to keep her talking. "How did you first know you loved Khan Tegus? Did you --"
    "I'm tired," she said and climbed the ladder to bed.
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    And that's how it is with my lady. Sometimes we share a few words about the food or My Lord's prowess with the rats or the cold that burrows between bricks, but let me broach the topic of her khan, or black-gloved Lord Khasar, or her father and his house, and my lady is suddenly as tired as a weeping willow in full leaf.
    My Lord the cat is asleep on me or I would've ended my account and gone to bed long ago. His purring shakes my lap but steadies my hand.

    Day 160

    The guards generally don't speak with us. Sometimes they shout at us, but they don't expect a response. Times I've asked them for news of the world, for fresh meat, for anything. Even knowing they'll say no, it's a thrill to holler through the hole and know that another person hears my voice and might answer. Her honored father must have warned them sharply to leave us well alone, but this morning I got one to speak.
    I held open the flap to dump the wash water and splashed someone's boots.
    "Watch it, now!"
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    "Sorry," I said, not afraid, for I knew the voice as belonging to one of our regular guards. "Is he gone?"
    "Lord Khasar? Yes, gone two nights ago, thank the Ancestors."
    "Did he hurt any of you?" My hand still smarted from the bashing and made scrubbing my lady's stockings and unders no pleasant task.
    "Not much," he said.
    It was more than he'd spoken to me in all our tower days, so I risked more questions.
    "Can you tell me, what does the sky look like today?"
    "Sky? It looks like a sky."
    "Is it blue?"
    The guard snorted. "It's always blue."
    But he's wrong. Though we call it the Eternal Blue Sky, I know that sometimes it's black, sometimes white, sometimes yellow, pink, purple, gray, black, peach, gold, orange, a dozen different shades of blue with a hundred different kinds of clouds in thousands of shapes. That's what makes it so wondrous. If the guard couldn't see that, I wouldn't bother to explain.
    "What of the world?" I asked. "Is there news from Titor's Garden? From my lady's family?"
    The guard laughed like a horse snorts. "I feel like I'm talking to the dead. You're not coming out of that
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    tower, miss, not unless that lord from Thoughts of Under breaks you out, and then he'd snap a maid's neck and toss her to the dogs, more than like. Enjoy your brick room and don't worry about what's outside. Nothing here belongs to you anymore."
    He was laughing when he said it, but I could read his voice plain as my own letters--he was sorry for us, and he was sorry for being sorry.
    They weren't nice words he said. He could've lived a good life and died never having made a person feel rubbed down to bones and too sad to hold together. Still, it can't be an easy thing, guarding two girls who've been thrown into the rubbish heap of Under, god of tricks. I think he laughs because he doesn't want to hurt for us.
    While he was still close enough to hear, I sang the song for stone hearts, the one with the bristling tune that goes, "Chick tight in a shell, wings up and away." He listened some, then walked on.

    Day 162

    Spring's here, the first breath of it anyway. The stone floor is not so cold at night, and the air coming in from
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    outside, which used to smell like a hole dug deep, now smells like blue sky. My Lord senses the change, too. He's friskier, wants to jump and play, and I exercise him with stockings and bits