Unspoken: The Lynburn Legacy

Unspoken: The Lynburn Legacy by Sarah Rees Brennan Page A

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Authors: Sarah Rees Brennan
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Kami woke the next morning, the walls of the hospital ward, white and spotless as her hospital sheets, seemed to be mocking her. The minutes stretched on and on, but at last her dad came. He slipped in the door past a nurse, saying, “Kami, I know all the other kids are throwing themselves down wells now, but your mother and I have a firm policy of no danger sports until you’re eighteen.”
    The nurse gave him a startled look because of the perfect English and the Gloucester accent. Jon Glass, born and raised in the Vale, gave her an amused look back.
    Kami’s grandfather Stephen had been the wandering soul and the last member of the Glass family, who had been farming in Sorry-in-the-Vale for years. He had sold off the farm, but he’d kept the family home, even while he spent years wheeling and dealing in Japan, where the economy was booming. He brought his Japanese wife to the Vale for a visit as they went through Europe. She was going to have a baby, and he’d thought that she should have a holiday. They stayed for the rest of their lives, which for him was less than a week. With him dead and her only asset the house, Megumi Glasswas stranded in a tiny English town where everyone found her alien and suspect.
    “Have mercy, Dad,” said Kami. “Tell me you’re here to rescue me before they break out the Jell-O.”
    “I even brought you clean clothes.” Kami’s dad held out her headband with the tiny pair of gold spectacles attached to one side.
    “You are a god,” Kami told him.
    “All I ask in return is your eternal reverence and worship,” Dad said. “Also, it would be nice if you did the ironing occasionally.”
    Getting out of the hospital and into the car made Kami’s headache worse. She rested her head against the car window for the first part of the drive, watching the green fields roll by and be replaced by hills, curving gently on all sides. On the hill farthest away from them, as their car began the gradual drop down, was Aurimere House, witnessing her return.
    “Dad,” Kami asked, “what do you know about the Lynburns?” She watched him carefully, expecting something like the fear on Mum’s face at the very mention of that name.
    Instead her father glanced back at her, unconcerned. “Not much,” he said. “The twins were a few years older than me.”
    This was a detail that nobody else had mentioned. Kami could not believe she had been pestering everyone else in town when her father had been willing to offer up information all this time.
    “The twins?” repeated Kami.
    “Rosalind and Lillian Lynburn,” her father said. “I knew who they were, of course, but I don’t think they ever spoketo me. They held themselves apart, being the girls from the manor. Rosalind Lynburn got together with an American and moved away, and Lillian married Rob Lynburn and they moved as well. I heard Lillian and Rob went to check on Rosalind, but I guess they went traveling, as you don’t have to search for family for seventeen years. Even your mother answers her email more often than that.”
    Kami grinned up at him and asked, “Who is Rob Lynburn?” Aside from Ash’s father and not Jared’s, since Dad was talking about him as if he was still alive.
    “He was a cousin, I think,” Dad said. “He lived with the Lynburns. Everybody always said he was going to marry one of the twins, though Lillian was dating someone else for a while. Edmund Prescott, I think it was, but he left town. People were a bit nasty about it. Said he was running away from Lillian. I don’t think it broke Lillian’s heart. She married her cousin Rob a few years later.”
    Ash was shockingly attractive for someone whose parents were cousins, Kami thought. “Strange they’d want to move back, if they don’t have any friends here.”
    “I know, there’s nothing for them here,” Dad said. “Except the mansion.”
    Kami snorted and her father turned Shepherd’s Corner, down along the road by the woods.
    “I may know why

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