The Choosing (The Arcadia Trilogy Book 1) Read Online Free Page A

listened on purpose, concerned there wouldn't be enough food for winter or that Mary the Goat might be in danger of being seized by neighbors and eaten if there was a shortage of food. Sometimes she listened because she'd found herself sitting next to her sister Pippa, whose conversation revolved solely around boys and how she could get enough coins together to purchase ribbons for her plain hardwoven tunic. "Let her be," mother said mildly when Livy complained. "There's beauty in the world and Pip just wants to be a part of it." She'd straightened, her hands on her sore back, trying to work out the pain. "Sometimes we all do, Olivia. You will too. Someday."
    Maybe she would, but she was on the verge of sixteen and so far boys were interesting but less important than caring for her family and learning everything Grandfather Bane could teach her while there was still time. Before he'd taken to his bed, his bones decaying and his hands gnarled into claws, Grandfather had ventured into the badlands, the Forbidden Zone of the Void, collecting radioactive scrap from the Before Times. She knew it had sickened him, and she knew that some of the metal her father worked likely came from the same place: the very borders of the Forbidden Zone, the entrance into the desert of the Void.
    Tonight she had to listen harder than ever to overhear her parents. Her eight-year-old brother Kellan was engaged in telling a story that on the surface sounded like a revolt staged by traitors but which in reality was some game he'd been playing with his friends. Livy didn't much like his friends. It was safe to play at revolution as long as the point of the game was that the Centurions came in to save the day, that the rebels were wrong and were summarily vanquished, but she sometimes thought his friends, who always volunteered to play the Centurions, weren't kidding about their desire to grow up and don the red jackets with the shiny brass buttons.
    "Are you all right tonight, Mads?" Livy's father asked under cover of the children's chaos.
    Livy could hear the weariness in her mother's voice. "Just tired, love." Without looking Livy knew her mother would have one hand protectively over her belly. "There's always so much to do in spring, and half of that is dreading everything that will have to be done in summer."
    "And so in fall, and so in – well, not winter. Too cold. Time to snuggle up together warm in bed under all the covers – "
    Her mother shushed her father even as Livy felt the blush climbing her cheeks. They needed to stop the lovesick talk and get on with something important. She wanted to know if her father was going to tell her mother what he'd been doing in the shop.
    He didn't. Not then, anyway. Instead he went on to something that made Livy want to shout at her siblings to shut up and listen. Not that her parents would then have gone on talking. After he finished telling her mother about the latest trade for metal and that he hadn't had time to look for the fabrics she had asked for, and after Livy's mother had asked, only half humorously if he wanted to spend the winter either naked or wearing rags, he continued more softly than ever.
    "There's talk in Tundra of tax collectors."
    Livy sensed her mother's stillness and bristled when her Pippa demanded her attention for a minute, wanting Livy to weigh in on the subject of getting another barn cat to keep the hay free of rodents.
    When she could hear her parents again, her father was saying, "New tax year," and her mother, "They've sped it up, last year it was late as the cusp of winter," and her father, "It's all right, there are so many, you can't think that."
    "But she'll be sixteen," Maddy protested, and Livy stilled, feeling fear flush up through her. It was Livy's birthday that had just passed, and her sixteenth at that.
    From the corner of her eye, she saw her father put a hand over her mother's hand, his voice too low to be heard over the squabbling of Vicki, all of six but more