Wyrd Sisters Read Online Free Page A

coldness of the castle. Yes, that was probably it. Weil, those wretched trees could do a decent day’s work for once.
    â€˜I’ll have some cut down and brought in directly, my cherished,’ he said.
    Lady Felmet was momentarily speechless. This was by way of being a calendar event. She was a large and impressive woman, who gave people confronting her for the first time the impression that they were seeing a galleon under full sail; the effect was heightened by her unfortunate belief that red velvet rather suited her. However, it didn’t set off her complexion. It matched it.
    The duke often mused on his good luck in marrying her. If it wasn’t for the engine of her ambition he’dbe just another local lord, with nothing much to do but hunt, drink and exercise his droit de seigneur. 2 Instead, he was now just a step away from the throne, and might soon be monarch of all he surveyed.
    Provided that all he surveyed was trees.
    He sighed.
    â€˜Cut
what
down?’ said Lady Felmet, icily.
    â€˜Oh, the trees,’ said the duke.
    â€˜What have trees got to do with it?’
    â€˜Well . . . there are such a
lot
of them,’ said the duke, with feeling.
    â€˜Don’t change the subject!’
    â€˜Sorry, my sweet.’
    â€˜What I
said
was, how could you have been so stupid as to let them get away? I told you that servant was far too loyal. You can’t trust someone like that.’
    â€˜No, my love.’
    â€˜You didn’t by any chance consider sending someone after them, I suppose?’
    â€˜Bentzen, my dear. And a couple of guards.’
    â€˜Oh.’ The duchess paused. Bentzen, as captain of the duke’s personal bodyguard, was as efficient a killer as a psychotic mongoose. He would have been her choice. It annoyed her to be temporarily deprived of a chance to fault her husband, but she rallied quite well.
    â€˜He wouldn’t have needed to go out at all, if only you’d listened to me. But you never do.’
    â€˜Do what, my passion?’
    The duke yawned. It had been a long night. There had been a thunderstorm of quite unnecessarily dramatic proportions, and then there had been all that messy business with the knives.
    It has already been mentioned that Duke Felmet was one step away from the throne. The step in question was at the top of the flight leading to the Great Hall, down which King Verence had tumbled in the dark only to land, against all the laws of probability, on his own dagger.
    It had, however, been declared by his own physician to be a case of natural causes. Bentzen had gone to see the man and explained that falling down a flight of steps with a dagger in your back was a disease caused by unwise opening of the mouth.
    In fact it had already been caught by several members of the king’s own bodyguard who had been a little bit hard of hearing. There had been a minor epidemic.
    The duke shuddered. There were details about last night that were both hazy and horrible.
    He tried to reassure himself that all the unpleasantness was over now, and he had a kingdom. It wasn’t much of one, apparently being mainly trees, but it was a kingdom and it had a crown.
    If only they could find it.
    Lancre Castle was built on an outcrop of rock by an architect who had heard about Gormenghast but hadn’t got the budget. He’d done his best, though, with a tiny confection of cut-price turrets, bargain basements, buttresses, crenellations, gargoyles, towers, courtyards, keeps and dungeons; in fact, just about everything a castle needs except maybereasonable foundations and the kind of mortar that doesn’t wash away in a light shower.
    The castle leaned vertiginously over the racing white water of the Lancre river, which boomed darkly a thousand feet below. Every now and again a few bits fell in.
    Small as it was, though, the castle contained a thousand places to hide a crown.
    The duchess swept out to find someone else to berate, and left