Read Wind Over Bone: The Estralony Cycle #2 (Young Adult Fantasy Romance) for Free Online Page A

his eye-holes. Mad eyes. She wondered if he had walked into the hall by accident; he must have put on someone’s discarded mask and been quickly overwhelmed by the crush of bodies.
    “ Where are you staying?” she said. “I’ll take you back.”
    “ Help me,” echoed the boy, drawing his knees up and rocking.
    “ You needn’t fear me. I’m quite a bit smaller than you.”
    “ Small and smaller. There is no size in this place.” He still rocked. “I am a ghost, you are a ghost, and we could squeeze together into a tiny stone.”
    “ What place?” she said. “Where are you?” Something was wrong. More wrong than simple lunacy.
    “ Look about you.”
    Sarid shook her head. “Only dancers.”
    “Give me your hand and I’ll show you.”
    She knew she shouldn’t. She could slip into a mind as easily as walk into the sea—it was some of the first magic her father had taught her—and an insane mind was worse, much worse, than the deepest, most pressure-pounding crack in the ocean floor.
    She grabbed his hand.
    His skin was cold and dry, and the air smelled of winter. The grotto was the same, the candles still glowing. But it seemed wrong somehow, as through it were all a misty simulation of some past event. As though if the mist were to clear there would be nothing; some worn stones and withered sedge.
    “Do you see them?” The boy was standing now, and he pointed to where the dancers should have been. The hall was the same, but empty.
    But as Sarid looked closer she saw that the garlands were dead and twisted up like ancient throats, the velvet curtains threadbare, faded to an ugly dun, the green walls covered with a film of smoke and dust centuries old. Her eyes followed to where the boy was pointing.  The floor. Shapes moved beneath it like shadows behind gauze, angular and grotesque.
    She heard faint cries, screams, and strangely affected by it she put her hands to her ears. “What are those?” she said. “Under the floor?”
    “ The slaves,” said the boy in the mask. “They put iron rods through us. We were puppets and so they made us. But it’s not fair.” He began to cry. Tears soaked through the cloth of his mask. “I didn’t know. I didn’t know anything. But they hunt for me and make the stones hot. Gods,” he cried, and a chunk of the floor gave way under him.
    Sarid grabbed his arm and pulled him to the side of the hole. Light came from it, shifting and red like an ember; and it grew, following his feet, and Sarid tugged him away. The floor smoked; Sarid’s shoes blackened, heels threatening to turn under her. She gasped when the burn reached her feet.
    She ran full out, pulling the boy after. He was so heavy, so much taller than her, and the stones groaned and crumbled always just where their feet had been.
    Finally they reached the other side of the hall, and the crumbling slowed. The stones didn’t smoke and heave so. The result was that she turned her eyes toward the hole and saw inside it.
    Humans, Elden, saebelen, and other, stranger, races danced below in an orange blaze.
    They looked like twisted paintings of familiar subjects. Blurred, smeared, as though Sarid’s perception had been choked off right where they danced. Some had rifts in their faces, holes to a deep, black place. They carried flails of iron and ran between people hung up by their wrists, people in rich dress––ball gowns and dancing jackets––and Sarid recognized some of them. The boy in the otter mask was looking at a girl––the princess, whom Sarid knew from long ago. One of the blurred people, his mouth a windy, roaring hole, approached the princess with a long, iron screw. There was a pear affixed to the end. An iron pear that opened its petals and bloomed pain. Sarid closed her eyes and went down on her knees.
    She looked up and called to the boy, “How do we get out?”
    “ Out?” the boy said.
    “ There’s always a way out. How did you get in here?”
    “ There isn’t a way