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

tried, and Melisande feared the wrath of her
mistress. The two witches were ill-matched as mistress and apprentice.
Melisande would have thrived under a gentler hand, and Felunhala did not know
how to mentor without the employment of harsh criticism and angry outbursts.
    In the
early days of her apprenticeship, Melisande had promised herself that as soon
as she avenged her family she would free herself from Felunhala’s binding and
return to the countryside where she belonged. But as the years drew on,
Felunhala’s binding had taken root in her soul, coiling around her heart so
tightly she found it difficult to imagine living free of it, and somehow, she
still wasn’t any closer to destroying Blaxton.
    It would
help if he would return from exile, Melisande thought, casting an anxious
glance at Felunhala’s scrying crystals. She had wasted many an evening peering
into the misty depths of the largest crystal, trying to discern some image of
Blaxton, some flash of his location or his plans. But he remained hidden from
her, too far away for her power to be any use, and in the meantime there were a
hundred demands on her time, a thousand inane tasks to finish, and always with
Felunhala snapping at her heels.
     

Chapter 4
    In the morning they came for him, soldiers
with torches that gleamed off their brass buttons. The men reached for him and
hauled him upright, binding him and forcing him along with them. His legs would
barely hold him and he stumbled over his own feet as they led him up, and up,
and up, out of the dungeons. As he realized that they were taking him out of
that ninth circle of hell he began to scramble to keep up, and when the first
rays of daylight touched him from a window far over his head, he began to
laugh, and laugh. He was still laughing, with tears in his eyes, when he was
brought before his Queen.
    The wild-eyed young lunatic she saw before
her was not the man Queen Tryphena had been expecting, and she felt a flutter
of some foreign emotion – was it fear? Regardless, she stifled it and gave no
sign of her discomfort. She was not accustomed to being discomposed and refused
to appear so in front of her entire Court. Not that she was the center of
attention at present. The young man in question had drawn all gazes his way
with his grating laughter.
    “This is the man you found beneath my tower?”
When the guard answered in the affirmative a muscle in her face jumped, though
she remained otherwise unmoved. The prosecutor read the charge, an accusation
of Malicious Loitering. One of Tryphena’s first moves as Queen had been to make
loitering both malicious and a felony. It gave her police cause to arrest
almost anyone, and as a result her subjects had grown substantially more
respectful.  
    When the time came for Rathbone to present
his defense, the man rambled horribly, devoting much of his speech to some
creature he claimed to have encountered in the dungeons. At the Queen’s side,
her granddaughter Dimity raised a dainty lace handkerchief to her lips and
coughed delicately. Dimity was the only one of Delwyn’s daughters that the
Queen had any use for. Unlike the others, Dimity followed orders consistently
and to the letter. Delwyn had once commented that she, his third daughter, was
desperately lacking in spunk, but that was exactly what Tryphena appreciated
about her. At the moment, Dimity looked particularly appalled by Rathbone’s
graphic and nearly incoherent ranting. The beast was complete nonsense,
obviously a smoke screen devised to distract them. However, what the Queen was
able to discern from his the rest of his less than articulate speech was
displeasing. The young man claimed to have entered the square just as an
elderly man left it. He seemed to think that he had been arrested in the elder
man’s place.
    The Queen sniffed, a new and particularly
distasteful explanation for this confusion presenting itself to her. It was
possible that the revolting creature who reeked of her