In the Shadow of Lions Read Online Free Page A

him. He was a man, despite all his words. And men didn’t keep promises to helpless women. Not without some enticement. She waited for the flicker of his eyes as she lay there, the upturning of a corner of his mouth.
    She could see nothing, and it made her want to vomit. He was treating her as he would a proper woman, a clean one.
    “I cannot accept this grace,” she whispered. “You must send me from here.”
    He moved as if to touch and reassure her, but she saw his muscles twitch and reverse, a set coming to his mouth as his hands returned behind his back. “You must rest.”
    He left and she turned back to the wall. These waking moments were as strange and terrible to her as the dreamed ones. The memory of something pressed against her as the horses thundering overhead returned.
    “Let me die,” she whispered. No one answered.
    With her eyes closing, stray golden hairs on her gown caught her attention but did not hold it as she sank into her dreams. Once in the night she awoke and sat up. She sensed someone’s eyes upon her, but the room was dark and the candle extinguished. She was not afraid.

    “You’re showing this story to me because I want to die too?” I yelled at him. “You think I’ll root for her to live, and remember everything good I have left to live for, that I’ll skip out of here and head straight to some It’s a Wonderful Life matinee?”
    “You don’t want to die,” he said, still sitting in his chair. His shadow rose above him on the wall, growing larger, with wings spreading out, touching each of the walls surrounding me. “You want to run away. The afterlife is not a place for cowards.”
    Fear dripped from my heart to my stomach. “I don’t want to do this anymore. I just want to die.”
    “You don’t want to live,” he said. “They are not the same. Death is no escape.”
    “Let me die!” I screamed, throwing the computer on the floor. The screen went black. “What’s the use of writing a book if I’m going to die?”
    “Perhaps you never really loved words,” he replied.
    He waved his hands over the Tablets of Destiny and another story sprang to life. I got a flash of my book, sitting on top of a best-sellers list with people lined up to buy it. One face in the crowd saw me, too. I reached out to him, but the vision fled back into the pages, and the other story leapt into action again.
    “Wait! Fix it!” I screamed, pointing to the computer.
    He shrugged. “Call customer support.”
    I scrambled for the bedside table, finding a pen but no paper. I wrote what I saw next on my bedsheet. I would have to move on to the walls before he paused again.

    Within weeks Rose had established herself among the servants as a relentless worker, a woman who accepted work from the hand of her master without complaint. It saved her the grief of talking to anyone. She rose first in the servants’ quarters, washing her neck and face, pinning up her hair, and being away before the others woke.
    Sir Thomas moved her from laundry and feeding the animals to tending his children. It horrified her. Their high voices and quick little movements, like a pack of young rabbits who knew nothing of the world of blood and terror just beyond their door. Their innocence made her worry that at any moment she would be discovered and turned out. She wondered that they could not smell the past as she could, her sins that had decayed and piled up. She could no more be free of them than these children could perceive such a woman existed.
    Sir Thomas had built a world for them where suffering was light and food was fresh and no one was damned at birth. Children all over London were whipped for disobediences. Sir Thomas believed in whipping, he said, and produced a peacock’s feather to punish the children with. He was too casual about their innocence, and it made her nervous. He did not know how it could be shattered.
    Being utterly unnerved by the children, she unwittingly became a good mistress to them,