Wulfyddia (The Tattersall Trilogy Book 1) by Steele Alexandra Read Free Book Online

was working on the Lady’s Lake. It was called that thanks
to a Queen of several centuries ago, interred at the bottom of it after her reign
came to an end. Why royalty would be buried at the bottom of a lake it was hard
to say, but it was many centuries ago, after all, and things had been quite
strange back then.
    The
current trouble with the Lake had nothing to do with its long-ago brush with
royalty. The issue was far less sensational, though deeply troubling. The water
was rising. Inexplicably, after years of maintaining the same level, the water
was creeping higher with every passing day. Delwyn, son of Tryphena, who had
been tasked with handling this matter by his mother, had immediately come to
Felunhala hoping for some magic. Felunhala had summoned Melisande, and turned
the project over to her, with instructions that no one was to know that
Melisande, and not Felunhala, was handling the task.
    It had
been that way ever since Melisande was first brought to the castle. Those were
the terms under which she had become Felunhala’s apprentice. The witch had
discovered Melisande when she was just a child, still recovering from the death
of her parents, casualties of a royal rebellion.
    Delwyn,
Tryphena’s son and heir, had a bastard brother, Blaxton, fathered by King
Malachai Lucretius years before he had plucked Tryphena of Wollstonely from
relative obscurity, married her and made her Queen of Wulfyddia. The rumors
were that Tryphena had hated Blaxton from the day Malachai first brought her to
the castle, though the Queen publicly claimed that she had never been anything
but kind to her husband’s bastard. Whatever the case, though Blaxton was the
eldest son of the late King Malachai, he was not legitimate, and thus the crown
had passed to the King’s widow, Tryphena, and was destined for their son Delwyn
upon Tryphena’s death. The Princess Anise would rule after Delwyn, and Blaxton
and his children were cut out of the inheritance entirely. After Malachai’s
death, Blaxton had rebelled and attempted a coup, which was hardly an unusual
move for an illegitimate son. He had been routed, and his last stand before he
fled for the border was made in the hilly province of Arkestra, Melisande’s
birthplace.
    It was
at that point that Blaxton, otherwise a faintly sympathetic character, lost
Melisande’s support entirely. In a moment of vicious spite which Melisande
would never understand, Blaxton had burned Melisande’s village to the ground
and killed every occupant. Melisande was the only survivor of his brutality,
simply because she had been visiting her sickly grandmother when the massacre occurred.
She still remembered her return home to a field of ash and blackened bones,
where her parents’ remains were indistinguishable from those of the soldiers who
had fallen around them. She had vowed then to make Blaxton suffer for the
atrocities committed against her family, but had been too much of a child to
have any clue how to go about seeking revenge. She had lived with her
grandmother until the old woman died, and soon after, Felunhala had appeared,
as if summoned by the force of Melisande’s thirst for vengeance. The witch had
brought Melisande to the castle, to work for the one family in Wulfyddia that
hated Blaxton as much as Melisande did.
    But
there had been conditions, and Melisande still wore two of them circled about her
wrists like shackles. As it turned out, the crown had many uses for Melisande’s
power, not just to defeat Blaxton, but to protect the realm, to run the Castle,
even to keep the royal family healthy. The two black rings that encircled her
wrists were not ornamentation, but rather the means by which Felunhala helped
herself to Melisande’s power. The witch relied on the force of Melisande’s
magic when her own was not quite sufficient to complete a ritual or cast some
spell ordered by the crown. It was worth it; anything was worth the opportunity
to strike back at the man who had taken