Free Wulfyddia (The Tattersall Trilogy Book 1) by Steele Alexandra Page A

that
Spencer was already boiling water for stew, and had put down a dish of milk for
the cat. She paused for a moment in the doorway and surveyed her son, taking in
his pale face and the shadows under his eyes. The sight of him tugged at her
heart, for she could tell that something was bothering him. It frightened her,
to see him so wan and troubled, and she could only hope that it was some
ordinary teenage affliction— romantic angst, for instance— and not a more serious
ailment. She was not the type of woman to push for an answer, however, and so
she resolved to wait for her son to come to her, unaware that at the exact same
time, her son was resolving to keep her in the dark at all costs. 
    After
dinner they sat by the hearth in companionable silence for many hours, Spencer
with a book and his mother with her knitting. The cat came in as the blue dusk
transitioned to black night, and she sat across from Spencer’s mother, watching
the flash of her knitting needles with fascination. Eventually the sound of the
cat’s purring filled the little room, and Spencer stayed up later than usual,
reluctant to retreat from the warm chair to his cold bed.

Chapter 6
    The
night fell clear and silent. Melisande was allowed the luxury of retiring to
her bed to sleep, but her dreams were not soothing. One minute she frolicked in
her parents’ orchard, dancing between trees with fruit-laden boughs and sunshine-dappled
leaves. The next minute, the trees were felled at her feet, and her parents’
cottage was engulfed in flames as a blood-soaked moon rose. She could hear her
mother and father calling out to her as her skirt caught fire, the flames
crackling and jumping as the fire leapt from her hem to her hands, singing her
skin and sending her screaming to the creek.
    She
threw herself beneath the water, and then suddenly she was back in the lake,
with that horrible apparition. This time the woman was waiting for her, and she
howled a cry of triumph into the water, bubbles trailing from her mouth as she
paddled for Melisande. The witch’s apprentice struggled to wake, struggled to
pull herself from the water, but she could not quite extricate herself from the
clutches of the nightmare.
    Melisande
tossed this way and that, reaching up with a moan to scratch at her face with
sharp fingernails, and as she thrashed, she was circled by a multitude of
gleaming scales. The Salamanders, born of flame and her own fury, were drawn by
the force of her dreams, and one by one they had crawled from the darkness,
scurrying down corridors and slithering down walls, to creep into her chamber.
One lay over her head, scaly nostrils flaring at the heady scent of her hair.
Another lay at her pillow, forked tail resting possessively over her throat,
while a third was at her wrist, nose at her pulse, jealously lapping at her
skin. They hovered close to her, feeling the warmth of the same anger that had
called them into being, feeding on the power and the hatred and the stifled
fury. It nursed them, nourished them and kept their flickering life forces
strong. And still Melisande tossed and turned, fighting to reach the surface,
fighting to stay afloat.
    ***
    “Who are
you?” The whisper reverberated in her dreams.
    Who
    Who
    Who
    It was
not the only voice Cicely heard, but it was the most insistent. When she woke
struggling to place it, her tapestries were glowing with the white light of the
full moon. There were a thousand voices in the castle, a thousand open mouths.
The prisoners in the dungeons twitched and shuddered in their sleep, murmuring
beseeching words that melted, unheard, into the night. On the other side of the
wet, cold stone, the moat lapped at the black rock of Castle Wulfyddia, as if
promising to swallow the building whole one day. The moat was darkly vibrant
this night, as was often the case on a full moon. The ghosts of the drowned
swam deep in that water, singing a lament that rose to the surface of the green
glowing water in putrid