Futanari Legends: The Frozen Queen (Book 2: Astrid) Read Online Free Page B

very young woman in my own right, and if my mother’s magic runs through my veins as I suspect, I will be keeping my youthful looks for a very long time.
    “Icebow,” Keller the Black says, turning my face from side to side with his hand while I best maintain my composure. “Pretty name.” He pulls the red scarf from my neck. “Such beautiful lips, and skin. I am surprised I have not noticed this one earlier.
    Are you sure she is one of ours?”
    The sergeant nods, and I hold my words, fearing one slip of a magic note under my breath will alert him to my subtle manipulations. It is hard after so long of constant singing under my breath to stop it, so I remain silent while someone who could sense magic is so close.
    “She was with us on the ridge,” the sergeant adds, speaking the truth because that is where I joined up with them and started my deception. “And she was with me in the advance team before the lead unit burned from the mage’s fire. We watched it happen from the hills.”
    And a lie, I was not with him then. My invention, placed in his mind. I was with the mage, Astrid. By her side as she flung the fireball. In her carelessness she killed forty of them in the flick of her wrist, and throughout this deception I have felt the sting of the deaths of those men time and time again from my supposed friends and allies.
    Lives lost senselessly.
    Yes, these men are Imperials, and they dress as bandits to chase these two women, but death brings its own set of complications. Especially death in that scale by magic, and by one hand. Words will be told, and a hunt shall begin for this mage. The fact she is a Sister of Gundir shall not protect her from the rage of forty families and the secret sects of assassins loyal to the Empire.
    I always believed there were better ways to twist events to one’s liking. Through magic yes, but violence has a tendency to return to its sender. Ill blood seeks more of the same.
    “Do you know any of the men who died, girl?” Keller says, keeping his knuckle under my chin and his thumb close to my lips. He stares in my eyes, his own dark and foreboding. He is trying to pressure me through an indifferent look, to make me flinch, or to make me back away.
    This man is used to liars and reading people.
    Like myself. And also like myself.
    Only he works with the clergy and the flocks of worshipers, and I raucous and drunk crowds in bars. He is used to sins and liars, and I encourage them in both.
    We are closer in occupation than you think, priest.
    “I did not,” I say, straining to hold my silent notes, and trying my best to talk in a normal and non-bardic tone of voice. “I am a hunter from the Mist Valley, attached to-”
    “I know who you are,” Keller says, “and my, what a beautiful voice. How did you come upon so sweet a tone?”
    “Choir to the Church of the Empire,” I say, another lie, but with the truth twisted in there, and no magic to back it up. Mist Valley does have an Imperial church, built to convert the ones who still worshiped the Northern Gods, and hated by many of the old families there. The Mist Valley church did have a beautiful choir, and I just could have grown up a part of it. Part of lying is knowing what could be, and becoming a plausible part of it.
    Before you’re found out.
    “My,” he says, smiling, “a devoted one so sweet. Sing for me.”
    Without magic? This shall hurt.
    The archers, the Captain, the soldiers around us, and my sergeant fall quiet. Keller smiles, letting my chin goes as his eyes turn expectant and impatient at the same time.
    “Go ahead,” he says.
    I try my best to forget most everything I know.
    My voice is soft and soothing. “God-King of ours. The light of our world. Shine above us with your glor-i-ous fire.” I hold my magic, my song dead from mystical notes, but my voice as practiced as ever. Holding my magic inside feels like holding in a shaken bottle of ale, and the cork straining to pop off and explode. I must