Dragon Prince 03 - Sunrunner's Fire Read Online Free Page A

Still, every so often he found himself in an unfamiliar corridor without the faintest idea which hallway led where. On one of these confused wanderings, too embarrassed to ask directions from servants, he had discovered the archives.
    He never ceased being grateful to the impulse from the Goddesss that had made him go through the archives himself rather than send them untouched to Stronghold or Dragon’s Rest. The records of five High Princes—Roelstra and his ancestors—and a Regent of Princemarch were stored at Castle Crag, enough parchment to fill a square measure of bookshelves. He had been working methodically back through them since finding the locked door that led into a series of dark, dry chambers. Into history. At first he had thought to have Alasen help him, but one of his first discoveries had quashed that notion immediately. For in the archives he had found Pandsala’s precise, logical, oh-so-secret list of her murders.
    Rohan had told him the bare minimum of facts: that during her regency Pandsala had removed several persons she considered detrimental to Pol’s future as High Prince. The disclosure had been brief and bitter. Ostvel had not pursued the matter despite horrified curiosity about what Pandsala had done and how. But he had at last understood why she was a forbidden topic around Rohan and Sioned, and why they had not gone to Castle Crag for her ritual burning.
    Roelstra’s daughters, he told himself, shaking his head as he locked his library door and sat down at the huge slate-topped desk. One of a score of keys unlocked yet another coffer of most-secret records. The lesser archives were being sorted by trusted scribes. Treaties, trade agreements, marriage contracts, the everyday effluvia of running a large and powerful princedom; none that held any dangers. But all that was in the locked coffers Ostvel read himself. Roelstra’s daughters, he thought again; the labeled dates told him that within would be Roelstra’s concealed records about Ianthe, Feruche, and Rohan.
    And perhaps what he feared to find: record of Pol’s true ancestry.
    He flinched when rusted hinges squealed a protest as he raised the lid. At least it had obviously not been opened in years, probably not since Pandsala received the keys he himself now possessed. He wondered what she had felt on reading this parchment giving Feruche to her hated sister, or this copy of a letter from Roelstra congratulating Ianthe on the birth of her first son, Ruval. Ostvel stared at the name, remembering with terrible clarity the first time he had seen it: on Pandsala’s list of murders.
    He had decided to investigate the most recent records first after finding the archives, and chose a coffer bearing Pandsala’s seal and the date 719. The top layer had been her private diary, sporadic entries regarding politics and their implications for Princemarch and the Desert; internal difficulties, how she had dealt with them, and what she suspected motivated them; and, dated in the summer of that year, a heartbreaking series of jotted notes regarding Pol.
    I am blessed by the Goddess with the presence of the only two I have ever loved. Pol is all I hoped he would be, and more besides. I love him more than I would have loved the flesh of my own flesh. His mother could not love him more. He ought to have been mine! Rohan is as I remember him: as perfect and golden as his son. They both should have been mine. Instead they belong to Sioned. Why does she have everything and I nothing?
    But those words had not given him the shock of the other parchments, drawn up as if formal Acts of her Regency. He had found them at the bottom of the coffer, neatly folded, each penned in her elegant script. Sentences of death. And at last he had learned the how of her murders, and the why.
    He could see the documents as clearly as if they were spread out before him, could feel again the horror of first reading and realizing what she had done to her own blood on behalf of a