Lord of the Abyss & Desert Warrior Read Online Free

am the Guardian of the Abyss and the Lord of the Black Castle,” he said because it amused him.
    “Do you not have a name?” A quiet whisper.
    It made him go still inside. “The lord does not need a name.” But he had had one once, he thought, a long time ago. So long ago that it made waves of darkness roll through his head to even think of it, the monstrous curse within itching to take form.
    He snapped a hand at Bard. “Take her back!”
     
    L ILIANA COULD HAVE KICKED herself as she was dragged away by a massive hand, her heels scraping along the stone floor. She’d attempted too much, too soon, and the twisted evil of her father’s sorcery had struck back like the most vicious of snakes. “Wait!” she cried out to the retreating back coated in unyielding black armor. “Wait!”
    When her jailor stopped to open the door, she glanced around wildly, trying to find something with which to save herself. There were no weapons on the wall nearby, but even if there had been, she was no warrior. The servants were too afraid to help. Maybe she could throw the bread, she thought with a dark glance at the hunk thatsat on a platter on the huge slab of a dining table to her left—it certainly looked hard enough.
    Oh.
    “I can cook!” she yelled as Bard started to drag her through the doorway. “I’ll cook you the most delicious meal you’ve ever had in your life if you—”
    The door began to close on her words.
    “Bard.”
    The big ugly lug stopped at his master’s voice.
    “Take her to the kitchen,” came the order. “If she lies, throw her in the cauldron.”
    Relief had her feeling faint, but she managed to wobble around to walk beside Bard when he released his hold and turned to lead her down a different corridor. “He was jesting about the cauldron, wasn’t he? You cannot have a cauldron big enough for a person?”
    Bard halted, sighed, looked at her with those wide, liquid eyes. When he spoke, the sound came from the depths of some deep cave, so heavy and thunderous that her eardrums echoed. “We,” he said, “have knives.”
    Liliana couldn’t tell if he, like his master, was making a jest at her expense, so she shut her mouth and said nothing as they wound their way through black hallways free of all ornamentation, down a single wide step and through a heavy wooden door into a warm, sweet-smelling room at one end.
    A startled pixielike creature looked up from where she stood by the large freestanding bench in the center. “Bard!” the woman said, her voice as high and sweet as her face was tiny and wrinkled in the most unexpected way—at the corners of her lips and along the bridge of her nose. The rest of her skin, the color of the earth after rain, was taut and smooth, the crinkled tips of her earspoking out through dark hair she’d pulled back into a thick braid.
    A brownie, Liliana thought in wonder. She wasn’t a pixie at all, but a brownie, a creature her father had hunted to extinction in Elden, for their blood made his magic so very strong.
    Bard pushed Liliana into the room with one big paw. “New cook.” He was gone the next instant.
    The brownie’s face fell.
    Feeling terrible, Liliana walked over to stand on the other side of the bench. “I’m sorry.” She hadn’t even thought when she’d spoken. “I was trying to save myself from being sent back to the dungeon when I said I’d cook.”
    The other woman blinked at her. “Oh, no, oh, no. I’m an awful cook, I am.” Picking up a biscuit from a tray on the bench, she dropped it to the floor. It bounced. “I do not know why the lord has not had me beheaded. Perhaps, oh, yes, perhaps he enjoys that my food matches this place.”
    Startled by her friendliness, Liliana said, “But you looked so disappointed just then.”
    The woman’s ears turned pink at the tips. “Oh, no, that was nothing. Nothing at all. I’m Jissa.”
    “Liliana.”
    Reaching out, Jissa pinched Liliana’s wrinkled and blood-encrusted dress. “I am