Free The Hollow Queen by Elizabeth Haydon Page B

recorded in famous ballads like The Rampage of the Wyrm and The Burning Fields, epic songs studied by every Cymrian child. Melisande, who in her heart had craved excitement tinged with danger from a very young age, had discovered that the fantasy of dangerous adventure and the reality of it were very different.
    Even though, if the truth be told, she had enjoyed a good deal of it.
    And was even more grateful to have survived it.
    After agreeing to accept Rhapsody’s offer of the mission, she had been packed into a carriage, surrounded by soldiers from her brother’s forces, and sent under guard due west to the Great Forest with the ultimate destination of a sacred, untrod area north of the Tar’afel River known as Gwynwood. She was expecting to be looking for Gavin the Invoker, a man she had never met but who was known to be the religious leader of the biggest population of believers on the continent, those nature worshippers called the Filids, numbering more than three million.
    Instead, Gavin had found her.
    She had not recognized him when she met him after her carriage was attacked by highwaymen and set on fire. She had been lost in the virgin wood and wandering helplessly, just a few days short of her tenth birthday. She had thought him a vagrant, at best a forester, and had traveled grudgingly with him to what turned out to be his own center of power, the Circle, the central place of religious observance for the nature priests of the Filidic order.
    Only to discover that he was their leader.
    Gavin had guided her successfully from the Great White Tree to the sacred lands where Elynsynos’s cave was reputed to be, then let her go on alone as the Lady Cymrian had instructed them. She had found the dragon’s lair, had entered it bravely, in her own opinion, only to find it empty, with no sign of the beast.
    But at least she had been able to find Krinsel, a Bolg midwife who had been badly injured in a battle of dragons between Elynsynos and her vicious daughter, Anwyn. The sight, upon discovering her, of the midwife’s eye, white like a poached egg, still haunted Melisande’s dreams.
    So while she had been able to rescue the midwife, instruct Gavin to seal the dragon’s cave as Rhapsody had ordered, and make it back safely to Highmeadow where her brother and the Lord Cymrian were waiting for her, planning to send her off again, Melisande could not help but feel like a failure.
    Especially since immediately thereafter she had been packed off on a journey to the Nain mountains, mostly for her own safety in the upcoming war, but also because she was accompanying Rhapsody’s oldest friend in the world, a First Generation Cymrian named Analise, and the Bolg midwife she had rescued, who was being sent for healing to the Lady Cymrian herself, who herself was planning on going into hiding with her baby in the Nain mountains.
    Melisande’s tenth year of life so far had therefore consisted of missions into forests, over mountainous terrain, witnessing yet another dragon battle between Rhapsody and Anwyn in the steppes that led up to the Nain kingdom, and observing an impressive negotiation with Witheragh, a wyrm with a sour attitude who guarded the entrance to the Nain kingdom on the other side of the Molten River. In the presence of four of the most impressive women she had known in her life, Melisande had loved her travels, had loved being of aid to her adoptive grandmother and her little cousin, who, in spite of being very young, was already fun to play with.
    And being allowed to explore the kingdom of the Nain with its very own princess was an opportunity that no one she had ever heard of had been granted.
    It therefore seemed petty and selfish to be missing the excitement of the outside world after settling into a routine of tending to the baby, attending to her studies, and listening to tales of the three women in her company. Melisande had been raised by an extraordinary father, a