Wind Over Bone: The Estralony Cycle #2 (Young Adult Fantasy Romance) by E. D. Ebeling Read Free Book Online Page B

you, anyway? One of the gentry? Someone’s secret by-blow?” He said it lightly, as though he didn’t much care.
    Sarid looked into a window. His brother’s comment about his ignorance must have stung. She shrugged. “Gentry, I suppose. Or used to be. My family did a terrible thing forty years ago.” 
    Rischa didn't say anything. But he was sure to hear the details at some point, from someone less than sympathetic towards her, so she decided to get it over with.
    “My grandmother was seduced by a saebel.” She spoke as though she were reciting a lesson. “She got pregnant and was run out of Charevost. She bore my father, and he grew up and was lonely and abducted a human girl, so my sister and I are a quarter saebeline.”
    Rischa shook paprika out of his shirt collar. “You've a sister?”
    “Yes. She lives with my father in the mountains.”
    “ If they’re there, what are you doing here?”
    “ My mother.” Sarid scarcely remembered her: white-blonde braids, tight hands, an anxious voice. “She ran away with me. She was fostered here, and thought the Pashes might act kindly towards me. She died when I was young, and so did my nurse, and after that my tutor left and people ceased bothering with me at all. And I rather like it that way.”
    “ But,” he said, eying her furtively, “your apartment is a ruin, you gather sausages in your skirts, and I’m sure people like Vanli and Leva make your life unbearable. All because your grandmother had a saebeline child?”
    “ That’s not the worst of it.”
    He stopped and she bumped into him. “I don’t want to hear it.” He’d grown some. Sarid had to look up at him now, and it was humiliating, and oddly nice, and she didn’t like the mixture at all. “Besides”––he took her hands and the feeling grew worse––“forty years ago what harm could you’ve done?”
    “Don’t touch me.” She said it kindly and pushed him away. He looked bemused, hurt, and she said quickly, “It’s not you. It’ s my power. I’m scared something will happen. That I’ll lose it, if I try for another sort of––what you want.”
    He ran his hand up the side of his head. “Like that, is it?”
    “I don’t know. Could be.”
    “ I could never do it.” He said it with such vehemence she laughed.
    “ No one’s asking you.”
    “ Thank Ayevur.” They started walking again. “I’m going west to Anefeln for three months.”
    Sarid couldn’t hide her frown, the pause in her steps.
    “There’s no help for it,” said Rischa, looking pleased. “My father wants to see me some of the year. And Charevost is too small to retain us for long.”
    “ And your brother––”
    “ He’s staying here.”
    “ Why is he staying here?” she said slowly, but she already knew the answer.
    He said haltingly, as though the words tasted bad, “he’s less trouble up here, out of the way. And because of you. I’m sure you’ll get used to each other. If you agree. You’ve agreed, haven’t you?”  It was a very optimistic thing to say, even for Rischa.
    Without waiting for an answer, he turned and began walking away from her. “Perhaps in the time I’m away you’ll have decided whether you want to be human or saebeline.”
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     

 
    Four
     
     
    Rischa went west with his family’s retainers for three months, and the place seemed unnaturally quiet––something Sarid would have welcomed in the past. But this time she was bored and discontent.
    Mari noticed, and ignoring Sarid’s halfhearted protestations, smuggled her into her group of friends, where Leva conveyed the bits of conversation meant for Sarid to the eagerly listening Gryka. And Sarid was discreetly showcased, her chair turned toward the room entrance, her melancholy face lit by windows, especially when Count Pash was about. Sarid tolerated it and soon got used to it.
    “It’s working, anyhow,” Mari said once. “Pash doesn’t let Vanli