Free The Fanged Crown: The Wilds by Jenna Helland Page B

that we stopped talking about Cardew.”
    “Still, why kill her? There are other ways to end a marriage,” Harp pointed out.
    “Not if you want to marry a queen.”
    “Cardew wants to marry Queen Anais?” Harp said doubtfully. The queen already had a consort, who was rumored to be perfectly weak-willed and unambitious enough for her tastes.
    “Her niece, Harp. He wants to marry Princess Ysabel.”
    Maybe if Harp had been sober, the wheels of his mind would have spun a little faster. As it was, he didn’t comprehend what Avalor was implying.
    “Ysabel is just a girl…”
    “Impressionable and easily manipulated.”
    “What about the queen we already have?”
    “As you may or may not know, there have been plots to remove her since The Children’s Massacre. With coordination and cleverness on the part of her masters, Ysabel could become queen of the realm.”
    “Which would mean that Cardew …”
    “Would be royal consort and have the ear of the queen.”
    At that thought, Harp automatically reached for a drink that wasn’t there. “What do you have in mind?”

CHAPTER EIGHT
    29 Ky thorn, the Year of the Ageless One
    (1479 DR) Chult
    ‘e have to stop him,” Boult said when Harp had finished. “I knew Ysabel. She was a sweet child. She used to follow us around the castle yards, pretending she was an elf. Just a tiny little thing with a huge gap-toothed smile.”
    “She’s not a child anymore,” Harp said.
    “Her brother and mother were murdered on. the same night. Granted, her mother was as bad as the daughter of Asmodeus himself.”
    “So you’re with me?” Harp said. “We’ll do it for Princess Ysabel?”
    Boult shot him a look. “We’ll do it for what Cardew did to you.”
    Despite himself, Harp winced. “And to you.”
    After a quarter hour of walking along the path through the thicket, the ground opened up, and
    they found themselves in a stand of towering trees. The ground was nearly devoid of plants between the massive buttress roots, and sunlight filtered down in streams through the ceiling of leaves above them. There was an unnatural silence in the grove, as if the wildlife saw them approach and found places to hide.
    “The.thickets must have been the outer band of the jungle,” Harp said looking up at the towering treetops hundreds of feet above them. “Have you ever seen trees that tall?”
    “Captain?” Verran asked, walking up behind him. “The body’s over there.”
    “Could it be an animal carcass?”
    “Possibly,” Verran said, but he didn’t sound very convinced. “I didn’t look too closely.”
    “Everyone have a look around,” Harp said. “Keep an eye out for more … plant monsters.”
    Verran led him to a spot beside a buttress root. When Harp reached it, he could see that the root was partially hollow and someone was tucked inside.
    “Can you get Boult?” Harp asked Verran. The boy nodded and headed across the grove.
    When Harp bent down, he could see that something had been gnawing on the body and most of the face was gone. And there was something odd about the remains. It was as if sections of the corpse had disintegrated down to the.bones while other parts were untouched by decay. A netting of skin bound the corpse into human form, and as soon as those skin-strands broke, the body would fall into an unrecognizable heap. Harp had seen many bodies in various states of decay and dismemberment, but nothing quite as disconcerting as the one before him.
    He could see strands of reddish hair tucked under a green hood and a gold necklace hanging around the neck. He heard Boult come up behind him and pulled back so the dwarf could see inside the hollow.
    “Let me,” Boult said gruffly. Harp wandered a few steps away and stared up at the towering trees as the light glittered through the spaces between the rustling leaves. He could feel every muscle in his chest as he took each breath. He’d wondered about Liel so often in the past ten years that it seemed