Regret (Lady of Toryn Trilogy) Read Online Free

last fifteen feet, tumbling
indelicately into a pile of dead foliage in an extremely un-ninja-like manner.
Whoops.
    Brushing leaves off her clothes,
Ashlyn straightened her mask and tucked several errant strands of hair back
into her hood. Okay. No big deal. Get in, get to her father, get out. The
getting out part would be more difficult if her father didn’t cooperate, but if
it came down to that…well, she just had to remember the old proverb about
cutting off the head of the snake. Without her father, there would be no army,
and she was next in line for leadership.
    She felt considerably more
confident than she had a few hours ago, but was still unsure about the prospect
of challenging her dad to a Leadership Duel.
    Unfortunately, she was out of
time to deliberate over it. Now or never. Do or die.
    Ashlyn jogged along the base of
the cliff, keeping under the overhanging ledge in an attempt to stay as
inconspicuous as possible. When she reached the outcropping of rock at the
entrance, she slowed down, forcing herself to walk casually. She could feel her
heartbeat in her throat, pulsing fiercely against her tongue, as she took her
first step into the encampment.
    No one even gave her a second
glance, which was almost hilariously anticlimactic after all the different
scenarios she’d conjured up in her mind. Ashlyn made a beeline for the cave
entrance, then deliberately slowed, trying not to look too eager. A soldier
nodded to her as he walked past, and she returned the gesture. He didn’t seem
to notice anything, and kept walking.
    Ashlyn glanced up casually,
surveying the cliff face. It was very steep on the inner walls, unlike the
backside of the mountain, which was slanted enough that she could climb up and
down without too much trouble. Although an attack would have been possible with
archers at the top of the mountain, there would have been no way for them to
get down afterwards without going around the long way. This was an ideal
location for an encampment. The only downside that Ashlyn could see was the
extreme cold that plagued the southern half of the island in the winter- but of
course when the war started, it would have been summertime. Presumably when
they’d set up camp here, they hadn’t expected the war to last this long. Ashlyn
suppressed a smile. It appeared as though Kou and her father had underestimated
Jackson and the rest of FLD, just as her father was underestimating her now.
    She was struck by the total
silence around her as she wove her way between the tents. In any ordinary camp,
even a military camp, there would be snippets of conversation, and she’d been hoping
that everyone would be chit-chatting so she could attempt to pick out their
dialects and figure out where most of these soldiers were from. But there was
no chatting. No conversation, no joking or laughing or even crying. Just a
whole lot of nothing, unspoken whispers ringing in her ears with the gentle pad-pad-pad of her own footsteps.
    It was, in a word, unnerving.
    But she reached the cave entrance
without ado, and if they were a bunch of strong, silent types, Ashlyn wasn’t
about to fault them for that, just as long as they stayed strong and silent
long enough to let her get to Lord Li.
    Her eyes took a moment to adjust
when she stepped inside, and the first thing she noticed was a torch mounted on
the wall opposite her, burning ambitiously but not quite succeeding in chasing
away the shadows around it.
    The entrance opened into a large
cavern, with stalactites hanging down from the ceiling like an angry threat,
dripping water on the stone floor. Although the outer edges of the room had dry
ground, the floor’s center was swallowed in a large, shallow puddle.
    There weren’t many soldiers
inside- just four, clustered off to one side and sharpening their weapons.
Ashlyn noted with some irritation that one of them was holding an oversized bo
shuriken, much like the one she’d lost several years ago. It wasn’t the same
one- his