Free The Shadow Within by Karen Hancock Page A

the chair, scattering the servants like startled sparrows. “That will be all, thank you. I am accustomed to seeing to my own needs.” He motioned toward the door. “You may go. I will call when I need you. Lieutenant, post your guard outside the bedchamber.”
    Channon nodded and stepped out, but the attendants stared at him in astonishment.
    “Your Highness—” Haldon began.
    “Go!” Abramm barked, gesturing again at the door.
    At Haldon’s nod, the others, looking puzzled and hurt to a man, put down the various articles of bathing and clothing they held. When they were all out and the door closed behind them, Abramm sagged against it and let out his breath.
    As the tension bled out of him, the sickness he had been holding at bay refused to be ignored any longer and he found the chamber pot just in time. Afterward, as he rinsed his mouth with water to chase away the taste, he noted his hands—chapped and blistered from the rough work he had put them through last night, and also blotched with red welts, a sign of low-grade exposure to spawn spore.
    Spawn spore . . . I have to do a purge! His head pounded and his ears buzzed and fatigue pulled at him. Right now!
    He staggered toward the bed, mentally pressing his way through the fog in his brain to focus on the Light within him, a tiny flicker in a great sea of darkness. He touched it and clung. The buzzing increased, accompanied by the cold blue sensation of the spore coursing through his veins. Fire flamed up his left arm, and his thoughts shifted. The pain was terrible. He might burn his arm. What if there was too much spore? He was so inexperienced, so weak. Maybe he should wait for Trap.
    Grimly he resisted the mental distractions, turning his thoughts back to the Light and the One who gave it. The buzzing intensified, making his teeth rattle as it swelled up in him like a cloud of angry bees. His grip on the Light quailed, flickered, faded. . . . He groped again, cried out for help—
    And then something snapped. Shards of color exploded through his inner vision as the white burst through his flesh, searing away everything else. And the purge began.

CHAPTER
    6
    Abramm was still at the dock when Simon passed through the vast King’s Court on his way to the royal apartments, pushing through the crowd of courtiers as if he were the vanguard of an advancing battle line. Pummeled by questions and suggestions and the offensive perfumes of the more dandified of his peers, he left in his wake scowls and wounded egos, and any number of broken fences he’d be weeks mending.
    By the time he limped up the broad staircase at the court’s far end to cross the parquet-floored Upper Court and Gallery, his initial fury had submerged itself to a calmer, if no more courteous, state. Thus, when he finally burst into the antechamber of the royal apartments and pushed past the Grand Chamberlain into the sitting room, he had himself under a measure of control. Finding the lofty, blue-carpeted sitting room empty, he followed the murmur of voices through the book-lined privy chamber and study into the blue-and-gold royal bedchamber where the king was just finishing his dressing.
    To Simon’s surprise, except for the servants, only the diminutive Ives attended the king this morning, the other members of Gillard’s trio of merry men presumably still recovering from their night of excess. Or maybe they’d gone down to the docks to have a look at the new arrival. In any case, it was a refreshing change.
    Gillard gave him a nod. “Ah, my lord uncle, the duke. Good morning, sir.”
    In the four years since he had ascended the throne, Gillard had changed much. The constant association with fawning courtiers had worked its inevitable influence, and lately the boy had become almost as much of a dandy as the court’s Lord of Fashion, Temas Darnley. Today he wore the ballooning, slash-cut breeches that were the latest rage with white hose and a billowysleeved doublet of violet satin