The Hidden Coronet Read Online Free Page A

want. The awen-beads will draw it to the top room . . . Haven’t I taught you the spiral yet?”
    Raffi shook his head.
    Oddly stiff, Galen’s voice said, “Shine that light back here.”
    The Flainscrown was withering. Even as they watched, the leaves dried up, the petals turned brown and flaked into dust. Galen held nothing but a dry stem. He snapped it thoughtfully.
    “What does it mean?”
    The keeper gave him a sidelong look. “I don’t know. Yet.” Outside, Galen turned left, but as Raffi closed the door his eyes caught a scuttle of movement on the stair.
    “There! Look!”
    The lamp shook, sending shadows flying. Galen grabbed his shoulder fiercely. “For God’s sake, keep quiet!”
    Around them the house rang with the cry, agitated, like a still pool broken by a stone. All the ends of Raffi’s nerves quivered; he felt cold, instantly cold.
    After a moment Galen said, “What was it?”
    “A . . . small thing.” Raffi gripped the warm handle of the lamp with both hands to steady it. “It . . . crept.”
    “A rat?”
    “Bigger.” His heart was thudding like a pain. Galen didn’t move, as if part of him was reaching out, sensing. Then he said, “It’s coming. We’d better get back up there.”
    Quietly they ran up the broad wooden staircase, and all the way Raffi felt the stirring in the house, the slow gathering of something far below, its energies twisting up the smooth balustrades, the invisible carved cornices high above his head.
    In the top room Galen propped the door open, snatched the lamp, and put it in the center of the beads, its light opening a complex net of seven spirals, jet and green, small emerald sparks glinting in the dark. He pulled Raffi close, inside the pattern, and the raw tension of the Crow scorched, so that Raffi jerked away, breathless.
    “Keep still!” Galen hissed.
    Far below, something was coming. They couldn’t hear it but they could feel it; a pulsing energy, unformed yet, gathering itself out of cellars and deep courses of brickwork. It rose up along passageways, through halls, all the time knitting together, clotting into a swirling flux that crowded Raffi’s sense-lines so that he could barely breathe, and had to crouch down over the sharp stitch in his side.
    Closer. Now the whole house creaked with it, as if it drew itself in filaments of darkness out of all the wooden stairs and warped doors, ran in trickles down the damp walls. And it breathed; he could hear its breathing, and its footsteps as it climbed. Staring in dread at the black rectangle of the open door he clutched his coat in tight fistfuls, feeling Galen draw himself up beside him.
    The keeper was intent. A soft, rich scent filled the room, the muskiness of decay.
    Then, in the doorway, a shape moved. Raffi saw it through the glow of the awen-spiral, a presence lurking out there in the dark.
    “Closer,” Galen said. “Come closer.”
    Slow, reluctant, it slid into the room, huge and dark, all the desolation of the house held in a loose human outline, featureless and blurred, as if it might break down at any time, might flood out.
    Galen held his hand up. “Enough.”
    It stopped.
    Shivering, Raffi pulled back, shook off sense-lines. He didn’t want to feel it; the stink of it in his nostrils sickened him.
    “Why are you still here?” Galen asked softly.
    The outline blurred. A gap like a mouth opened in the smooth face. “This is unfair,” it hissed. Its voice was hoarse and crude; a patchwork of echoes and creaks and overheard whispers. “I wanted to go. He awakened me.”
    “Who awakened you?”
    “He did.”
    “Do you want to be at peace?”
    “Let me. Let me go. Into the dark.”
    It squirmed, its outline breaking down, the body running and dissolving suddenly into a black pool, trickling and spreading over the floor to the very edge of the spiral. Small black fingers touched the beads and jerked back.
    “In the name of Flain,” Galen said quietly, “I dissolve you and absolve