The Island House Read Online Free

want to put the folder down. It might disappear ashe had. She watched herself place it on the table as carefully as an offering. From somewhere outside her head, she saw that she was shaking.
    Eight remembers a lot. Four does too. Even at four she’d sensed her parents’ unhappiness, and sometimes, after she’d been put to her bed, after the last story had been finished and she was on the edge of sleep, she’d heard them in the rooms downstairs.
    Her mother, mostly. Shouting sometimes.
    Michael did not shout, he spoke more softly.
    Her mother would cry some nights. Then a door would slam—the downstairs bedroom, that’s where Elizabeth went when she did not sleep in the big room upstairs. The room Freya thought of as her father’s.
    Those were the nights she did not go to sleep. She’d wait for him to walk up the stairs, wait for the door to the bedroom to open, wait longer for the light under the door to go out. Then she’d run from her own warm bed and burrow in behind his back. He never said much, just “Go to sleep. You’ll see, it will be better in the morning.”
    But it wasn’t. They’d pretend, of course, for her.
    It was then that dread had become her companion, because Freya knew, she knew, that one day she’d come home from school and he’d be gone. And that is what happened.
    Freya squeezed her eyes shut. Why?
    From misplaced loyalty perhaps—but loyalty to what, to whom? Elizabeth would not tell her. Not when she was a child and not when she was an adult. Even now it was never possible to talk about the meaning of that absence in their lives, but there was anger. A rich vein of it beneath the surface of the skin, hers and Elizabeth’s, too, with confusion at its core.
    And now there was this. A manila folder. A package.
    “For my daughter, Freya Dane.”
    She thought he’d forgotten. But why contact her now, and inthis way? Perhaps the folder would tell her that Michael had married again, that there were other children out there—half brothers and half sisters.
    Freya got up with such force the chair squawked. “I’m hungry.” The weakness was low blood sugar, bound to be. “And I’m not going to do this now.”
    She would make him wait as he had made her wait, all those years ago.
    But at least, then, she’d had hope that one day the door would open and there he would be again—that he would ask her to forgive him.
    She’d never worked out if she would or not. Tears or icy rejection? It depended on her mood.
    Fingers stiff as twigs, Freya lit the gas ring as wind began to hunt the eaves of the house. The flame, when she struck it, was bright. A star in that dark room.

CHAPTER 4

     
     
     
    R ATHER THAN run for the doubtful safety of the Abbey, Signy and Laenna had scampered back to the rushes. Burrowing, they’d clawed their way to the roots, curling together in the mud like cats in a basket. And there they’d lain as the sack of the Abbey began, too frightened to move.
    The invaders had begun with the chanting shed, but now all the buildings were burning, the sky was burning, as Findnar’s newcomers were herded toward death and worse. Perhaps the raiders were demons, evil beings conjured from flame, creatures who feasted on blood.
    The howls were the worst. Even at this distance, the sisters could hear men screaming. Who could tell if it was the newcomers as they died or the raiders about the slaughter?
    They heard women’s voices too. Higher-pitched, sobbing, screaming out one word, over and over. Mary.
    It was owl-light now, that dangerous time half light, half dark, when things change their shape. The screams stopped, and there was a lower confusion of sounds. Smoke was thicker than mist. Soon there was only the crack of burning timber and the occasional shout as an invader found something or someone missed in the first chaos. Meat was cooking; the raiders must have killed the animals as well.
    “Stay here.” Laenna was pushing the reeds aside, wriggling away.
    “No!