Read The Fanged Crown: The Wilds for Free Online Page B

him as hard as she could in the shoulder.
    “Ouch,” he said, laughing. “You’ve got quite an arm for a little girl.”
    “You’re so mean,” she said sulkily, glancing at the cut on the top of her foot, which was bleeding slightly.
    Teague looked down at her smugly. “You fall for that every time.”
    “And you never get tired of the jest,” she replied, giving him a shove. “Have you seen Cousin Daviel?”
    “How should I know where he is?” Teague asked.
    “I saw you two in the kitchen just a little while ago,” Ysabel said.
    “And yet I didn’t see you,” Teague said. “Little sneak. Still playing elves in the woods.”
    When Ysabel stood on the palace’s eastern balcony on the occasional clear day, she could see the green tapestry of the Wealdath, the massive forest that had once stretched much farther inland. Sometimes she and her cousins pretended
    to be elves by sneaking around the courtyards and making mischief on the unsuspecting groundskeepers. But they had to be careful at such games. If someone discovered them and told their mother, Evonne, her anger would be as bright and as hard as the sharp edge of a blade. She never lashed them herself. But it might be better if she did because her manservant wielded the belt with an arm made of iron. Now that their Aunt Anais had been crowned Queen of Tethyr, it was less dangerous to play at being elves. But still they never knew who might be listening.
    “You have to stop following us,” Teague
    “Why?” Ysabel asked, following him into the dark room. She heard him roll back the stone cover from the hearth, and soft red light from the fireplace filled the room. “Are you plotting something?”
    “Did Mother and Auntie Anais arrive yet?” Teague asked, ignoring his little sister’s queries.
    Since the death of their father, Garion, a few years before, Teague and Ysabel rotated from palace to palace while Evonne remained in Darromar year round. Evonne was constantly busy with political work in Anais’s Court of the Crimson Leaf—so busy that her children only saw her a few days out of every month. Evonne was beautiful to look at and had a quiet lyrical voice even when she was furious. But she frightened Ysabel sometimes, especially when she talked about the degraded races—the rotten ones who should be removed from Tethyr forever.
    About a year before, Teague had whispered to Ysabel that their mother might actually be crowned the Queen of Tethyr. Ysabel worried that her Auntie Anais might be unhappy because she was actually next in line for the throne, at least according to the Line of Succession, a favorite topic of her boring tutor.
    Evonne had sent Teague and Ysabel to an isolated farm to live with a silent old man who never let them out
    of his sight, which was strange because the brother and sister were used to little or no supervision at all. The old man was called Filgarth, and he had once been a warrior, or so said the scars on his arms and face. Filgarth was toothless, which troubled Ysabel—how did he eat?—and he had no duties other than to trail them as they played in the fields or forest. Despite their ever-present chaperone, Ysabel liked the run-down farm, which was close to an oak forest and had a leaky barn that was home to a litter of stripey kittens.
    After a few months, one of their mother’s servants appeared on the winding dirt road that led to the out-of-the-way property. He took them back to their mother’s house in Darromar, as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened. A tenday later, they attended Auntie Anais’s coronation, and Ysabel and Teague returned to their normal cycle of spending a few months at each of the palaces scattered throughout the kingdom.
    “There’s a fog,” Ysabel told Teague, crossing to the slit ^in the wall where she could feel a wet mist creeping around the thick stones. “Mama and Auntie had to stop the night in Celleu.”
    “Because of a fog?” Teague asked, coming to stand beside his