For Want of a Fiend Read Online Free

or risk losing her way in the dark.
    She tried to tell herself to turn back. She’d gotten into trouble too many times by following Katya or the Order, but it was too late; after two or three turns, she no longer had any idea where she was. Starbride hurried to catch up. Pennynail’s soft leather boots made almost no noise in the darkness, but Starbride wore slippers, even quieter.
    They reached a narrow spiral staircase, somewhere she’d never been. Her heart pounded, and her palms started to sweat. Thoughts on how she would get back to familiar territory drowned in the idea of an adventure, a discovery of something even Katya didn’t know.
    Before she could reach the top of the stairway, she felt the whoosh of another door opening, and then the light was gone. She swallowed and continued to climb while feeling in the darkness for a way out. She prayed to Horsestrong that there was only one door, and that it led into the palace rather than into another dark passageway. If she lost Pennynail, well, no one knew where she was. They wouldn’t find her in the endless passages. Even if she lit her lamp, she wouldn’t be able to find her way; she’d wander, lost and lonely until she eventually starved in some forgotten hallway with the walls of the palace crushing her on all sides.
    Thought abandoned her. She stumbled ahead, tripped, and barked her shin on a step. She smacked into a wall that gave under her pressure, and she fell with a cry as the door opened and dumped her into a circular room.
    A red-haired man stared down at her. “What the hell are you doing here?” he asked in a voice that wasn’t much more than a harsh rasp. His brows came down slowly, surprise turning to anger.
    Starbride scrambled up and glared back at this man who spoke as if he knew her. She opened her mouth to tell him to mind his own business when she took her first good look at him, at his leather outfit and the slender knives in their sheaths. “Pennynail?” she asked, anger fading into astonishment. “You’re—”
    He put his fists on his hips. “Were you following me?”
    There was no way to dress it up. “Yes.” She looked him hard in the face, trying to see why he might want to hide it. He had a rough scar around his neck, but his face wasn’t marred. Narrow and lean, he seemed handsome enough. His red hair was short; the long ponytail he sported must have been attached to the mask. He had sideburns that almost reached his jawline, and penetrating green eyes that hadn’t ceased their glare. He was older than Starbride, than Katya and Brutal, maybe Reinholt’s age, mid-twenties. She wondered then if it was really Reinholt that had introduced him into the Order, and hot on the heels of that thought was the realization that she was being rude.
    “I’m sorry. I…can’t resist a mystery.”
    He sat down heavily on a tattered chair. All the furniture in the room had seen better days. Perfectly round, the space was dominated by the column of stone that housed the stairway. The rest was full of odds and ends, bits of junk perched on rickety tables. One shuttered window offered the only other way out. Starbride realized they must be inside one of the towers. She hadn’t known that the palace towers held rooms at all.
    “I suppose you’d have found out soon enough,” he said. “Crowe’s grooming you to fill his shoes, and since I help Crowe with difficult jobs…” He gestured at her.
    “Difficult jobs?”
    “Like disposal.”
    “Disposal of…” She realized he meant killing people, and her stomach turned. Crowe led prisoners to the dungeons, which she supposed meant that he “dealt” with them, with Pennynail’s help. “Ugh.”
    “I thought you might feel that way.”
    Starbride fought hard not to squirm. It was still difficult to believe this man knew her. Pennynail knew her. She was comfortable with him, but this person? Her mind flashed on the time Pennynail had helped her undress when he’d posed as her in