Nine Kingdoms 9 - Dreamer's Daughter by Lynn Kurland

Author:Lynn Kurland
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Penguin Group US
Published: 2014-11-13T18:30:00+00:00

Eleven

Aisling walked through the garden and wondered absently how it was she could have lived her entire life in Bruadair and been so utterly oblivious to her surroundings.

Or, rather, the souls peopling her surroundings. She’d been acutely aware of how miserable the Guild was. She had memorized every ugly crack in every passageway she’d walked down day after miserable day. She had never not been cognizant of her surroundings as she’d wandered within a small part of Beul on her day of liberty each week because she hadn’t had time to roam farther afield. But she had never looked at any of the people there, never made note of anyone potentially being someone unexpected, never considered that those around her might be friendly.

Euan was her cousin and Bristeadh was her father. It was almost unbelievable.

Perhaps in time the memories might reveal themselves, but for the moment all she knew was that she’d done her damndest to forget everything she’d ever seen during those hellish years of her youth and young adulthood, and apparently she’d done a very good job of it.

She looked at her father’s house and felt absolutely no connection to it. Perhaps that shouldn’t have surprised her given how little time she’d obviously spent in it. There was magic surrounding it, that much she could see. It wasn’t magic that came from her father. He had again freely conceded his lack of the same without hesitation the night before at the supper he’d cooked for them by very ordinary means. He volunteered that his lack of magic had been something of an impediment to his marriage, but his extremely noble though not royal bloodlines had made up for that.

Not that it matters here in Bruadair, he’d said with a smile as he’d stirred his soup.

She had no idea what that meant and actually no desire to ask him. Perhaps she had spent too long with Rùnach, who considered first a man’s mettle before his station and only trotted out his own royal connections to tease her. Asking her father to explain the possible caste system of Bruadair was more than she’d been willing to do.

She’d been happy enough to simply sit in his parlor next to Rùnach and listen to the father she hadn’t known and the man she had grown to love talk politics. It was a little startling to realize she knew several of the players in the grand councils of kings and queens. It was also a little surprising to realize that she looked more like her father than she ever would have suspected. His hair was the same color as hers, a color that she decided wasn’t without redemption especially when viewed by lamp and firelight. He fidgeted the same way she did, restlessly looking for things to do with his hands. Once he had decided that Rùnach wasn’t worthy of death, he stopped fingering his dagger and started carrying on friendly conversations.

Rùnach, for his part, had been deferential. She supposed he thought permission

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