Read The Glass Casket for Free Online Page B

died, everything changed. Seamus Flint had shown up almost before the man’s body was cold, promising money and comfort, protection. Lareina had no family, after all, and had a girl to look after now—a girl who wasn’t even her own, he had said. How that had angered Fiona, for Lareina was her mother, if not by blood, then by spirit, and as Lareina often said, a woman need not birth a child to feel a mother’s love.
    Before their journey to the mountains, Seamus had told them that they were leaving to be closer to Fiona’s family. He had intimated that her long-lost relatives would greet them eagerly and with open arms, but they had done no such thing. The scholar, her uncle, had turned them away with barely a word. And just now at the square, the look in her cousin’s eyes … she recognized it. Her cousin had been told not to speak to Fiona—that she was dangerous. But what dangers could she possibly present?
    As Fiona walked the forest path back to her new home,her mind drifted to memories of her father. He had been a quiet man, a man not accustomed to showing affection, and yet he had been a good man, providing for her, always giving her a kind word when she was most in need. She missed her life by the sea—the warm winds and clear blue ocean swells.
    Her heart ached when she thought about the morning walks she used to take with Lareina, their bare feet sinking into the sand still cool from the night. There, they would comb for seashells to string into necklaces that her father might sell at the weekly open market. In the afternoons, they would sit in the sand outside their cottage, the warm sun beating down on Fiona’s shoulders as they worked. Lareina made a habit of setting the loveliest necklace aside for Fiona. Fastening it around her neck and kissing her on the cheek, she would say,
An ocean bloom for my ocean rose
. Those necklaces were gone now too. In the end, Goi Flint had sold even those. The past year had been a dark one, but Fiona was beginning to suspect that things might be changing. Perhaps her gentle stranger, that solid, earthbound boy, augured the start of a new kind of happiness.

    Lareina looked up from her sewing the second Fiona pushed her weight against the heavy wooden door. Setting down the needle and thread, she smiled at her stepdaughter.
    “Hi, Mum,” Fiona said, and kissed her on the cheek. “You were worried, weren’t you?”
    Lareina laughed and shook her head. Fiona’s eyes fell tothe knitting needle on the hearth, and a heaviness settled over the girl’s face. Her mother, Malia, had died an agonizing death—sepsis—and the root of it had been the prick of a simple knitting needle. Such a small thing to destroy the lives of a woman and child.
    When Lareina had first met the girl, she was barely a slip of a thing, ashen and traumatized, huddled by the hearth fire, in need of attention and serious grooming. She had been five, and it had been three months since her mother’s untimely death. Her black hair had run wild, and her large coal eyes had pockets of gray beneath them. To Lareina, she’d looked like a withered and grieving old soul trapped within the body of a child. Lareina’s first thought upon seeing Fiona was that she was somehow cursed—a witch’s spell gone awry. The girl had looked at her new stepmother with unseeing eyes, and Lareina, being not much more than a girl herself, and not knowing what she could possibly do to help the child, had sat beside her, removed a comb from her bag, and had begun the colossal task of untangling the child’s obsidian nest of hair.
    Since that day, the two had engaged in this ritual whether or not Fiona’s hair was in need of combing, and so the girl, now nearly a woman, undid her braid and sat at her stepmother’s feet. Picking up the comb that lay beside her, Lareina lifted her stepdaughter’s hair and ran the fine ivory teeth through it with care while Fiona rested her cheek on her stepmother’s knee.
    “How was