The Drowned Tomb (The Changeling Series Book 2) Read Online Free Page A

brown hair was pinned up haphazardly above her head with about a hundred clips, but this was the only concession she made to the sweltering heat. She still wore her large shaggy coat of animal skins. Robin had rarely seen her without it since their first meeting last year.
    “Hello you two,” she said without looking up. “Finished baking your brains, have you?”
    “Good morning to you too,” Robin said, wandering across the marble floor and over to her nook, trailing Henry behind him. “It is summer you know, Karya. Most normal people spend it outside mucking about. We haven’t seen you since breakfast.”
    “Yeah,” Henry said scowling. Henry didn’t consider Karya to be normal in even the slightest way. “You’ve not been outdoors all week. You’re always lurking in the shadows, reading and writing. It’s unnatural.”
    They hadn’t discussed it much, but Robin privately suspected that Henry was having trouble adjusting to this newest member of the Erlking family. Karya was a girl for a start, which made her in Henry’s mind instantly distrustful, and she was bookish and sharp tongued. She had helped to save Henry’s life from an inconvenient kidnapping, however, so he had decided gracefully not to kick up a fuss when Robin invited her to stay with them.
    Robin was bookish too, but that didn’t seem to bother Henry.
    Karya had seemingly taken to living at Erlking well. As far as Robin was concerned, she seemed to fit in well in a house full of misfits.
    “Unnatural? Reading and writing is unnatural now?” the young girl said testily, flicking her eyes up at the boys. Henry’s misgivings were mutual as far as she was concerned. As far as the Scion’s strange human friend was concerned, Karya clearly found him a constant, low-level irritation. “I’m sure you think it’s far more productive to go kicking a rubber ball around on the grass pointlessly for hours on end. Or prattling on endlessly. But some of us have actual work to do.”
    “What are you doing, seeing as you brought it up?” Robin asked curiously, looking over her shoulder. The pad on the desk before her was covered in indecipherable glyphs, symbols and calculations. “Henry has got a point you know; you’ve been hanging around the library for days. We’ve barely seen you.”
    “I happen to find the library restful and a good place to work. It’s the one place I can almost guarantee not to run into certain loud and annoying distractions.” She peered at Henry pointedly. “As for what I’m doing, Scion, it’s the same thing I’ve been doing for two weeks now, while some people have been wasting time sunbathing and whatever else you two do. I’m trying to translate something for your aunt.”
    “For Aunt Irene? Robin frowned, looking down at the girl’s scribbling covering the tabletop. “How come she’s got you working as her assistant then?”
    “Because the thing that I’m translating, or trying to translate at least, is not one of the nine languages she can read write and speak herself,” Karya said. She frowned down at her own notes. “It’s much too old.”
    “So why would you know it then?” Henry folded his arms. “You must be what, eleven years old?” Henry was a year older than Robin and didn’t like having his seniority challenged by someone younger and shorter than him.
    Karya gave him a withering look. “I don’t know the language, but I do know a more modern version of it. I’m backtracking, piecing together this protean tongue from fragments of later-developed languages.” She huffed. “But it’s not easy. It’s as difficult as it would be for a human like you trying to understand monkey screeches.”
    Robin found himself unsurprised that Karya might have a talent for ancient languages. She was a bundle of closely-guarded secrets.
    To be perfectly honest, he knew precious little about the strange girl who had erupted into his life the previous year. Karya was neither one of the Fae, like