Free The Red Wolf Conspiracy by Robert V S Redick Page A

the wrought-iron bench. A meeting with the Mother Prohibitor! It was a rare honor: girls did not have private audiences with the head of the Order except for the gravest of reasons. It's a trap , she told herself. I knew they'd try something .
    The Accateo , as the Sisters liked to call it, was the most costly and exclusive school for girls in the Imperium. Also the oldest, which partly explained the Sisters' tendency to speak Old Arquali, and dress in cloaks like funeral wraps, and to serve dishes (horse-liver puddings, starling broth) that had vanished from even the most traditional Etherhorde dining rooms a century ago.
    Also the loneliest, thought the girl, warming to her theme.
    Also the darkest, cruelest, most ignorant heap of stone ever to disgrace the word school .
    Her name was Thasha Isiq, and she was dropping out. It ought to have been the happiest day of the two years she had spent at the Lorg. Two years without a glimpse of father or friends, without hearing the ocean or climbing Maj Hill. Two years without laughing, except softly in corners, and at the risk of punishment.
    But she could not rejoice in her coming freedom, not yet. The Sisters' power was too great. They woke you with their songs (guttural chants recounting the evil history of womankind); they studied your private journals, not just openly but with a red quill for correcting your grammar; they questioned you about your dreams; they compared you with the impossibly pure First Sisters in the time of the Amber Kings; they gave you chores in house or gardens, along with meditations to recite nonstop while doing so. Then came breakfast. And after that, the real labor: your education.
    Thasha had known nothing about the Academy when Syrarys, her father's consort, announced that she was to be enrolled. When she realized Syrarys meant the walled compound with the grim towers and fanged iron gate, she refused outright. A great battle followed between daughter and consort, and Thasha lost. Or rather, surrendered: her father's illness, a brain inflammation that had lasted years, suddenly worsened, and the family doctor told her bluntly that Eberzam Isiq would not recover unless he was spared, temporarily at least, the work and worries of fatherhood.
    To Thasha the diagnosis stank of trickery. Syrarys hated her, though she pretended love. And Thasha had never quite trusted Dr. Chadfallow, friend to the Emperor though he was.
    The welcome letter from the Academy promised lessons in music, dance and literature, and for a while Thasha took heart, for she had dearly loved all three subjects. Today she almost hated them.
    The trouble was evil. It was the great obsession of the Sisters, and with it they poisoned everything they touched. “Literature” meant poring together over the journals of former students, now wives in the richest households across the known world: journals that recorded in humiliating detail each woman's lifelong struggle against the inherent wickedness of her nature. “Dance” meant mastering the stiff waltzes and quadrilles of society balls, or the erotic performances certain families demanded of brides for twelve nights before their weddings. “Music” just meant sin. Confession of sin in whining arias. Regret for sin in madrigals that never ended. Memory of sin in low, groveling groans.
    For close to a thousand years, the Accateo had spiritually mangled girls. They entered jittery, wide-eyed waifs; they left docile dreamers, hypnotized by the epic of their own rottenness and the lifelong struggle ahead to become slightly less so. Thasha looked over at a girl her own age, pruning the roses a few yards away: eyes heavy with lack of sleep, lips moving ceaselessly with her assigned meditation. Now and then she smiled, as if at some happy secret. A pretty girl, of course.
    Thasha shuddered. It could have been her. It would have been her, if she had stayed much longer. When a single story about the world pursues you all day, every day, and