A Wizard in the Way

Начало книги

Someone hammered on the back door of the hut. Mira turned from the cookpot over the hearth and opened it, instantly worried—who was ill now?

Little Obol stood there, panting, eight years old, eyes wide with alarm. “Run, Mira! There are soldiers coming toward your house, and one has a parchment in his fist!”

Mira’s heart lurched; dread weighted all her limbs. It had come at last. She gave the boy a sad smile. “There’s no sense in running, Obol. If the magician wants one of his people, we’ve no choice but to go to him.”

“You can flee!”

“Yes, to have his dogs sniff me out and his soldiers drag me back to him. No, I think I’d rather go with my head high and my clothes clean. But thank you, lad. Run along home, now—we don’t want them to know you’ve been telling tales.”

She bent and kissed his cheek. Obol blushed; he may have been only eight, but Mira was very pretty.

Too pretty for her own good, Mira thought with a sigh as she closed the door. By the time she was thirteen, it was clear that the pretty child was going to become a beautiful woman—but her parents had warned her that Magician Lord Roketh would command her to his bed if she were beautiful, and Mira suddenly understood why the prettiest girls in the village wept as they went to the castle with the soldiers. She had thought it would be a fine life, living in the lord’s keep to cook or clean instead of doing the same work in a peasant but all her life. Now, though, she understood why, when the girls came back to the village to buy food or cloth for their master, they seemed either timorous and fragile or hard and brazen. She vowed it would never happen to her and took pains to hide her beauty, tying her hair back in a severe bun and staying out in the sun so that her face would become tanned.

Читать дальше →