Read The Hidden Queen for Free Online Page B

with rapt attention the dust on his riding boots, so inappropriate for a royal lady’s bedchamber. Then he looked up, and his eyes glinted with a savage determination. “I’ve been careless,” he said. “It won’t happen again.”
    He turned around and contemplated the dead woman in what had also been his father’s bed. He could let that specter drive him from this room, from this palace, but it would take more than the dead to keep him from the dreams he had clung to for so long. “Get someone to clear up this mess,” he ordered abruptly. “I want this room habitable again before tonight. For now…I need a drink. Come, Fodrun, kingmaker. Shall I show you a place where a would-be prince-in-waiting often used to go?”
    It came as something of a surprise to Fodrun to realize the last thing he wanted to do was walk into some Miranei tavern with the man who would be crowned king within days. When he had promised Sif Roisinan, Fodrun had been thinking only of the battle to come; he had wanted a prince who would be a war leader to his leaderless, all-but-crushed army. What he received was something far bigger than he had bargained for—Fodrun Kingmaker. For some reason it sat ill on Fodrun’s ears. But the king he had made was waiting, and his words had been less a request than an order thinly veiled in courtesy. Fodrun drew a deep breath and dredged up a smile from somewhere. “Lead on, my prince.”
    The guards found Deira almost two hours later. By then she no longer had the document they were seeking; her reputation, so well respected by March, had been richly deserved. When the matter was brought to him, Sif was intelligent enough to realize he had lost that particular battle. The contents of the damnable document must have been the stuff of tavern gossip even as he sat quaffing ale with his general, who would emerge from that particular outing as the Chancellor of Roisinan. Counselled by his newly appointed chancellor, now First Lord in Sif’s new council, he did not order the woman killed; after all, he himself had summoned her to Rima’s chamber, and if anyone had been to blame for her keeping hold of the parchment, it was him. He had merely asked his guards, in a laconic tone laced with steel, never to let her cross his path again, and by nightfall she was packed and gone, set on the road of exile under permanent ban from Miranei for as long as Sif Kir Hama reigned. She was followed, as an afterthought; it had been Fodrun’s idea, and one of his own men who had been charged with it. Deira could conceivably have played them all for fools, and headed directly for Anghara’s hiding place. But March’s words had been heeded; Deira knew nothing. Fodrun’s agent followed her to her brother’s house, and, on his return, reported to Fodrun that the lady looked likely to stay there for the rest of her days, intimidating her brother’s lady with grim tales of the Battle of Miranei.
    The army that took Miranei had been only a fragment of the force that fought at the Ronval. These men had ridden hard and fast, reaching the keep quickly, ready for battle. The remainder of the men, who travelled much more slowly, had been something of an honor guard, their task to escort Dynan’s body. Everything had waited upon them, for the return of the dead king. Sif merely held the reins of power, but could not be crowned until his father’s body had been properly laid to rest, and these arrangements had been the first order of business Sif attended to. Dynan was given a ceremonial state funeral, which he shared, although it galled Sif to enshrine that relationship even in death, with his queen—and with a casket devoid of a body, purported to contain the remains of his daughter. Sif himself attended the formalities with his mother on his arm, Lady Clera having suddenly become a person of some influence at court. Not a muscle on his face moved during the ceremony, but Fodrun, who was beginning to read Sif’s moods by the