Free The Hidden Queen by Alma Alexander Page A

Anghara would cry out with the thwarted need to find something more of her mother in her aunt. On the other hand, she realized juggling Brynna with Anghara at a whim, depending on the company she kept at any given moment, would drive her mad within days. And besides, what if there was someone else with her aunt, a stranger, and she made some silly small mistake? Discovery could follow all too easily. So she clung stubbornly to Brynna’s thoughts and feelings; careful, thoughtful Brynna, who considered things conscientiously before she spoke, who would shy away from every unnecessary risk. Her first breakfast at Cascin was something of an ordeal, but at the end of it Brynna, although exhausted, was aware of a feeling of what was almost triumph—she had endured, and she had won. Chella had risen with her and given her a light kiss on the brow.
    “You’ll do very well,” she murmured. “You’re strong; you’ve got potential you haven’t touched yet. It’s probably just as well, for now. Do you want to go and explore a little? The grounds are quite safe, only don’t go falling into any of the wells, they’re still pure snowmelt. You might even run into the boys, they’re out there somewhere; they know you’re here.”
    Brynna colored a little and Chella chuckled.
    “They are your cousins, remember, but even if you take that away, they are now your foster brothers. You’re going to have to meet them sooner or later.”
    “How will I…” Brynna began, and then lost herself in the complexity of the question. She wanted to ask, without quite knowing how to go about it, how she was to know them, how she should approach them and win them. Her eyes dropped at Chella’s liquid laugh, but it was not unkind, merely amused comprehension.
    “They’ll know you,” she said, “and I hope I have instilled enough manners by now for them to introduce themselves and make a guest feel at home. After that, it’s up to you. To all of you. Perhaps I do wrong in not telling them the truth, but maybe it’s for the best—it’s yourself they will take you as, not a cousin whom they must accept for form’s sake.”
    Brynna wanted to ask what would happen if they didn’t like her. She saw months and perhaps years unfold before her in a black tunnel of loneliness as the single outsider, the youngest not counting baby Drya, the only girl in a clutch of boys—but it was a pointless question. There would be nothing Chella could do if those particular fears came true. So she merely gave Chella what she thought of as a brave smile, not realizing just how much of her soul was revealed in those expressive gray eyes, and obediently left the breakfast room to seek a way into the grounds.
    She was initially met with silence, with no sign or sound of children at play. The manor was set into a square of level, well-tended lawn which was nevertheless showing the effects of what must have been a recent retreat of snow—there were still patches of it in sheltered corners. The lawn was empty of any presence but that of what seemed to be a gardener skulking around the edges and picking at something—perhaps an early and hardy spring weed or two. What surrounded the lawn looked like wilderness. Brynna chose a direction at random, heading toward a copse of thinly spaced trees. They were still mostly bare, just emerging from winter, but there was a promise about them, a quickening in the not-quite-buds on twigs preparing to wake into spring. A long-tailed bird of a kind Brynna had never seen before balanced precariously on one of the topmost and most fragile twigs and filled the air with liquid song. Beneath the bird there seemed to be a tended path, and Brynna took it, exploring.
    Before long she heard the sound of water. She was soon to learn she would never be far from water in Cascin. The manor was set into a lattice of no less than seven streams bubbling down from the mountains at its back toward the River Tanassa at its feet; it was these