Lady Cherusay's Daughter, Book I: The People

The great tetrapylon at the Dawn Gate of Teginau had been built in the pride of the House of Kinnaith. Its four pillars were cut from green marble in the likeness of dragon’s legs, with massive móriad-steel claws clutching huge white marble spheres. Oil lamps dangled like shining dewdrops from the tips of the three spurs carved at the back of each leg, and a wheel of twelve more lamps hung from the center of the overarching dome, washing the wide stone floor with a steady golden glow.

The gates themselves stood wide. Within, more lamps high on posts lit the open square and the broad avenues that struck off from it; the wet cobbles glistened. Rothesay stared, amazed at the lights. “Is it festival?”

“What? No,” said her guide, staring himself but blind to what might have impressed Rothric’s fancy. “At least, Sowingfest is weeks off and we don’t start decorating yet. Ho, Malthes! Nargallond!”

The two guards, helm and armor gleaming under the lamplight, glanced up from their dice. “Yah, na Drogh,” grinned one, the owner of a thick brown beard braided with copper wire. “High time you found your way home. Thornac’s set to flay you, let him but catch you.”

Raian flashed his teeth. “He can try!”

The second guard, as burly as his fellow though his face was hairless as a boy’s, waved the dice cup at Rothesay. “Another present for the Prince, or the Chief? It’s been off its feed, perhaps! Not like you, boy, to bag straggle. Where’d you find her?” He grinned at his jibe.

“His name is Rothric,” Raian said pointedly. “He is a stranger. He comes from the north, on an errand for his master, the wizard Padriag.”

Rothesay was grateful for the introduction. The guards glanced over her, shrugged, and waved them on. “Welcome to Teginau, stranger,” the bearded one said gravely. Then he called out helpfully, as they passed into the square, “Owar the tailor, on Weavers’ Street, makes the most charming gowns and aprons—!”

Raian gripped ‘Rothric’s’ arm sympathetically, as the two guards howled at the jest. “No offense, friend, but you do look like a girl. Grow out your beard, would help.” Rothesay rubbed at her chin, crushing a grin. “Er, when you can, of course.”

“As soon as I can,” she agreed gravely.

She tried to shake off the queer feeling of walking into a trap. She was back in the safety of civilization, and great civilization, at that: she should be breathing easy for the first time since maybe the Meredale, and not ‘reaching’ for a warding-spell. She set her jaw, and walked resolutely beside her host. And watched, her breath short and her muscles hard.

Beyond the square, the great boulevard rose gently at first, and then more steeply. High walls of decorative stone pierced by strong but elegant gates only half-concealed the many-storied structures—could they really be houses?—that stood behind, engulfed in gardens, and all topped by the acorn-cap roofs that the Sferiari loved. Small lanes and alleys, some also warded by gates, slipped off from side to side, down which she glimpsed other walls, doors, and avenues. And everywhere, lights: more lamps on posts, where the larger lanes met; at the greater gates in the walls; some even in the gardens. Light shone from the many windows sheltered at the back of deep porches: though the hour was late by Harrowater’s reckoning, the citizens of Teginau showed few signs of retiring. More than one splendid home that they passed roared like a great water with the chatter of many voices, and unfamiliar instruments making half-heard music. Raian shook his head at one.

“Andramor and Tegi: they spend fortunes on parties. Everyone goes, of course; but watch your back. And your tongue!” He strode on; she was glad, not to go where she should watch her back, or more than she did of late. But she was beginning to think that the journey to Teginau was less than the journey in Teginau, that arriving at the city of one’s home was not at all the same thing as arriving home: Teginau sprawled in her imagination as huge as a whole country. All of Harrowater would fit between one cross-street and the next!

A large cloaked figure rounded the curve higher up; Raian at once melted back into the shadow of a dark gate, pulling Rothesay after. The man stalked purposefully past, swinging a heavy-headed cudgel and glancing all about, alert as a hunter. He did not note the deeper shade by the mortuary gate, and Rothesay almost forgot him in her interest in the dim tombs within, pale marble shapes in a skeleton of a garden barely touched by the mountain spring; but when Raian moved on, without comment or evident concern, “Who was he? Thornac?” she puzzled, recalling the guard’s remark.

“Nah—Thornac’s my tutor. That was a City-watch: we are out past curfew. Let him but catch us, it’s a rare drubbing for us, and a fine for Da.” He glanced up at her as he realized that his father would in no way owe a fine for Rothric. “Jail for you, I should think.”

“What!” Harrowater had none, but Kelmhal at Dunford did; she did not like its rumor.

“Just till morning,” he said dismissively. “Then you pay the magistrate.”

She pulled up short. “But the guards at the gate: why didn’t they—?”

“They know me!”

“The—the city watch doesn’t?”

“Galhur? Yah, and that well!” he exclaimed, his eyes dancing with meaning. “And the magistrates! Oh, oh, I see. Malthes and Nargallond—gate guards, them: not letting in anyone who doesn’t belong. Enforcing curfew—that’s the watch’s worry.”

“Oh, well! Once you’re in, they don’t care what you do?”

Raian grinned. “Yah. Good fellows, Malla and Nargo. Here’s my gate, anyway.”

It was metal, bronze maybe, knotted and braided like rope; beyond, a neat cobbled alley served a variety of tree-laced buildings, as though a village the size of Harrowater were walled and warded against the stone bewilderment of the city without. A door opened well down the alley and an elderly woman stepped out, a basket on her hip, her scolding voice answered from within by a man’s placating laugh; she snorted her scorn, and crossed to a door opposite. Rothesay heard it snap shut, and saw a small window glow with a lamp behind.

Raian shook the gate gently, but it was locked fast. “Just checking. Here, give us a hand up, lad: I’ll go over the wall, then open for you.”

Rothesay stood alone on the strange streets, feeling much more wildly the sense of a trap; or as though she trod upon the back of some vast slumbering creature, that might waken at a careless step and notice her, rather like the eyes over Great Cernefell. Heartbeats stretched into eternity; her glance darted up and down, watching for the dreadful watch, and she ‘touched’ every warding-spell she possessed. At long, long last, it seemed, the latch clanked, the gate drew back, and she was ushered in amid a rustle of vines to Raian’s curious home.

He locked up carefully behind them. Then, “Welcome to Raingold Enclave,” he said with great formality, making a deep bow.

“You honor me and all my family,” she replied equally formally, bowing back. “Er, we’re home, then?”

“Yah, sure!”

Through the mazy enclave, a family’s private holding within the great city, they wound on past slaves’ quarters, gardeners’ housing, even a smithy: Raingold of Kinnaith-Dunwyrding were numerous and important, with enclaves also in Alforrow, and Iril, the seat of Kinnaith. Raian’s father was Horse-master to the Prince of Tre-Uissig; his mother was the Kinnathen Librarian.

Raian spoke the title with radiant pride. Rothesay marvelled, firstly that a woman held a post; and secondly and more at the very thought of a Sferan library unscathed by war. Her fancy fell far short. Padriag owned some seven hundred volumes; as many more had burned at Anvedras long ago. But more than eighty thousand works were kept and cared for under the scrupulous eye of Linnas na Sul, Kinnatysel, Wylfricschara. A thousand were the fruit of the third extraordinary force in the alliance of the Uissig: Godrach, the Bard of Dunkerring, Anlaf’s mentor and his closest friend. Godrach lost no time in learning the Sferan sorcery called writing, nor in demanding it of anyone aspiring to attain the rank of bard—or to keep it. And so the lore of his race, the Songs of the Dawning and the Tugach Laws, the Kerring Chronicles and the Witch-boy stories and all the Riddles of Fradh, and so much more, were first committed to everlasting memory. Rothesay lusted for such a hoard; but the Library was at Iril.

A beautiful door, untidily framed in leafless vines, opened into a wall like a cliff-face; within, stone stairs spiralled down to the right, up to the left, and they climbed to a torchlit landing and turned, down a hall whose colored mosaics resembled neither Geillan nor Sferan art, as Rothesay knew them: in the dimness they looked like arguments in geometry, explained by a poet.

Raian now moved as warily as a forest creature, and Rothesay recalled the tutor Thornac who would flay him. She was deep in regret for accepting the invitation, never dreaming that a wish to be warm and dry would lead to such a labyrinth, when Raian slipped them at last into a long, low room and softly closed its heavy door with unmistakable gladness. Hanging by fine chains over a small altar against one wall, an oil lamp burned in a pierced bronze vessel, that scattered vague yellow stars upon the walls and ceiling. There were several beds, mats raised in carved wooden frames to knee-height and invitingly piled deep with furs and blankets. None were occupied; she wondered if their owners were away, nonexistent, or just still up like the rest of this peculiar nest of nightbirds. She let her pack fall to the floor.

A boy started up from the darkness between two farther beds. “Raian!”

“Sh! Sh! Sh!” Raian hissed fiercely.

“Where hava been, targa?” the other wailed, heeding him not at all but hurrying over to take his damp and dirty cloak. “Out for two days, and the rain so bad! Come, here, sit by the grate and do off your boots. Shall I fetch—”

Raian seized his young servant by his plump shoulders and shook him till his teeth rattled and his yellow curls bounced. Having thus stunned him to silence, he let go, but slowly, ready in case he started fluttering again.

“Good, then. Supper; wine; dry clothing.” He ticked off his commands on his fingers. “Lots of everything. And,” he pressed a rigid finger firmly to his lips, and held it up warningly. The boy nodded, round-eyed and anxious to please, and scurried aside. Raian turned to beam a proper welcome at Rothric, when from the door the boy bleated, “Thornac—”

Raian whirled with a fiery glare. But, “—can wait. Till morning, I should think,” he said levelly, a temperance that surprised Rothesay, who expected nobility to be rude, even violent. The little yellow-haired servant was lucky in his master.

She was shown to ‘the grate’, a heavy bronze screen set in the stones of the floor, and on it stood low stools with thick cushions and luxurious tassels, and a small round table. A draft rose through, deliciously warm and dry. Raian plopped heavily onto a seat, wrenched off his short boots, and upended them on the grate. Rothesay joined him joyously. Padriag’s villa had such grates in each of the main rooms, all connected by narrow tunnels under the floor: she had crawled in them as a child, as long as she could see no spiders, but she had imagined they were for the ease and comfort of the wizard’s four-, six-, eight- and no-legged guests and servants; certainly they had never been warm. She asked and Raian explained, surprised, the furnaces down in the scullery that fed the vents throughout his home. Padriag used his for a root cellar. Rothesay determined to set him straight, when she returned.

Long leagues away, over the cold sea and beyond to the very knees of the Dur Manthanor, Hautiger an-Velaker also settled in warm relief above the hypocaust in his private suite. His servants hastened to peel away his travelling garb, heavy with the melt of a late snowfall upon spring mud, and envelope him instead in the weight of thick silk robes and furred slippers. Mead, a parting gift from Kelmhal, warmed gently above a brazier fire that smoked with sweet incense. Beyond his door, the voice of his steward snapped like the bark of a watchdog, keeping at bay the dependents, officers and courtiers with all their urgent affairs that only his excellency could put right. Nothing that could not wait for morning would pass the formidable Gerrender.

Then, as a pretty little girl—Hautiger seldom remembered servants’ names, but the face was new, and a good choice for which he must commend Gerrender—pressed a cup of the steaming mead into his hands, the watchdog at the door and all the hungry horde fell silent. The servants within paused in their ministrations, and glanced at the door. Hautiger sighed, and stared sightlessly at his shuttered window.

He heard the door open, heard the rustle as all the staff flowed out like an ebbing tide; or as if the room rose to a height exalted beyond their measure, as the one who entered no doubt intended. He drew a long breath, turned, and favored his lady wife with a familiar smile.

Asilay el-Seremay had been a beauty in her prime. Many still thought her so; Hautiger knew the magical mask for what it was, for she did not trouble to maintain it for him. A long moment froze between them, pierced between their locked gazes, these lovers and adversaries, each weighing how best to use the other in their respective devices. They had grown much alike, over the years.

She was thin, even gaunt, as though her sorcery consumed her body like a fire. Her many robes, all of colored gossamers, stirred in the lightest breeze: one could think that a stronger wind might scatter her like ash. Only her hair weighted her down, massive golden ropes piled and coiled with jewels about her skull. And that, too, was illusion, of a sort: a great part of that gold had grown on other heads than Asilay’s. To the Darian eye, hair signified power; female slaves had theirs cropped to the jaw, and males were shaved entirely. Their loss was their owners’ gain: Hautiger possessed several luxurious veils to his naturally-naked pate. Yet still he sniffed, covertly, of course, at Asilay’s enhancements; nor ever suspected the hilarity that the courtesy of Geillan hospitality hid from Dunhaldring’s bewigged guest.

Asilay glided to the other chair upon the hypocaust and perched there like one of her infernal ravens on the rooftrees. She twitched her skirts into order, and lanced her husband with her pale gaze. “And what was so very—exciting?—in the southland?”

He would tell her. He knew he would tell her, give her whatever she wished to know. He could hardly hope to find Cherusay’s brat without Asilay’s aid; yet he could wish he still had choice in the matter. At least she could do no more than feel the pulse of his heart. What he saw with his eyes, and what he thought, remained his own, closed to her; he was not yet reduced to being merely a large flightless spy for her. And he still could command the manner of his revelations.

“Mead, my dear—?” It might have been as much answer as offer, for a moment, till he extended the cup, relishing even this small frustration. “Sweet mead.”

“Another time, perhaps. What was in Anstrede?”

Hautiger refilled his drink, swirled it idly, then leaned forward to smirk, “Oh, nothing. Nothing. Only your late lamented cousin’s elfin brat.”

For a moment there was silence as his words made no sense, conveying an impossible image. Then the dead waked and walked in her thought: she shuddered to a chill of horror as though the cold breath of the ghosts of the betrayed whispered on her neck. And then a tidal rush of avarice, that drowned all else: the witch’s pale eyes blazed. “No! Where is she? Where do you have her?” she cried. Her talonlike hands clutched the arms of her chair, and her gaze darted about the room, as if the girl might be stowed in a corner among the luggage.

“I do not,” he admitted with a grunt. “Kelmhal’s oafs blundered, and frightened her off. They, ah, sought her for me, for a time, but she eluded them.”

“Sought her for you? You took Kelmhal into confidence?” Asilay poised for rage; but his indignant surprise reassured her, more than his angry reply, and she remembered that while he might be boring, he was at least not stupid. “Fled, did she? Where to, I wonder?”

Hautiger shrugged. “Southward.”

“South—what a fantastic notion,” she retorted sardonically, and he flushed.

“Bah. All of Peria lies that way—can you find her, woman? I’ve sent for Haukur, to be ready for the morning.”

She nodded, but absently, already retreating towards that inner place of magic. “Of course. Haukur will do—very nicely. But not tomorrow. I shall need, ah, a few days. A few.” She pressed him then for every detail that might in any way touch upon the girl, all that he could recall and some he had not known he knew, and took her leave, oblivious to the dull, murderous mood at her back: it was so very familiar.

Asilay fluttered to her suite in a dream, there to accept only the least of ministrations from her attendants before dismissing them and bolting her heavy door to secure her solitude. Long she leaned against it, her head spinning with implications.

Eirenseld: her mother’s clan, and Cherusay’s, claiming descent from the elder Darians, children of the Moon and proud of it, despising the Sferan House Orthunder and desiring its ruin; Cashellan, who stood with Cherusay against her father: their resentment of her half-brother, the king Rumil, slumbered now, but uneasily; the flames of her own hatred, that she had thought quenched in the Celta Sferyn all those years ago. And the treasure. Oh, yes, the treasure, the mysterious wealth to whet even the gold-glutted Runedaur appetite. This brat—what had been her name? Rossay, Thessary? ah, no, Rothesay: for the snow-clouds—the child could know nothing about it. Yet maybe, just maybe enough resonance remained between Cherusay’s blood and Cherusay’s gold, that a certain sorcery might catch its fading echoes.

Not without catching the child, first. And so much to prepare . . . . Asilay fled for the warded room of her magical works, her thought so bent on its desire that the finding and freeing of the secret latch, the opening of the hidden door, the traversing of the twisting, narrow way happened as if done by servants’ hands and servants’ feet. The candles blazed up at her gesture and she scarcely knew that she moved; but now she stopped to look about, and remember.

The round room at the top of the Lady’s Tower was known to the residents of Castle a Geste, from without; they sometimes saw its eight dark windows flicker when their lady pursued her arcane studies. Its approaches were not; they were secret, and surely filled with traps; and though the centuries had faded the stains of the blood of a Geste’s architect from the stones, the power of that grim sacrifice still guarded those hidden ways from the unwarded trespasser. None but the sorceresses of Eirenseld had seen the eight arches, or the narrow apse at their hub under its blue glass dome; and few of those had seen the thoroughness with which its current mistress stocked it with every available aid to magic.

Cunning chests held stibnite, galena, mispickle, orpiment, flowers of sulfur, and tin, rotten or bright, in their many compartments; shelves and tables groaned under beakers of oils, jars of quicksilver, pots of grave wax; there were casks of Isorchian incense; a treasury of jewels, sapphire, ruby, amber, onyx and zircon, feathers of native silver, warts of copper. Codices and scrolls packed one vault of the eight-chambered room; and one housed Asilay’s particular fascination. In here lay the bones, pale and cold, of countless ravens, all carefully sorted and arrayed, but for a few skeletons left whole, with silver wire for sinew. Ravens’ beaks lay ordered on their special shelves, ravens’ feathers filled many baskets with soft darkness, raven-skin parchment waited on the desk to be written over in inks of raven’s blood. And caged in gold and silver, one living bird brooded over the corvine mortuary below, the sudden candleglow at Asilay’s entrance hardly rousing him enough to lift a feather.

Asilay paused, considering her stockpile. All was neat, arranged to exacting order; she knew the place of the least metatarsal as well as any dragon knew its hoard. But it had been so long ago that she had managed to obtain one tiny snip of her cousin’s chestnut hair . . . there. In an insignificant-looking drawer closed in a small silver jewel-case, a folded scrap of waxed silk that cracked as she opened it, but the one dark curl was still there. Ah, yes.

To the apse between the inmost legs of the arches, she brought a shallow silver bowl, and lit the candles about: dark blue for swiftness; and incense: Rodrane cedar, to rouse the pulse of kinship. A doll, made of silk and stuffed with herbs and her own hair and blood and spittle, her manikin, blackened now and hard from many occasions of the use it would once again serve: that, too, upon the slate-slab altar.

Then she must make a nuisance retreat to the kitchens and butteries of Castle a Geste, for wine and cakes, wroth with herself for being so giddy as to forget them at the first, and she spent the wait upon her sleepy maid stilling herself to steady attention. She warned the old woman to assure that no one sought the Lady of a Geste for three nights, at least, as her noble husband would understand aye well, and hastened back to her work.

The offerings arrayed, she opened a grey ash box, polished with antiquity, and drew from its furred nest a silver-hilted obsidian blade—and, for the first time since she first dared to lift it, Asilay hesitated.

Sarra Khel was the knife’s name, a name in the old tongue of Daria that was remembered now by few. Sarra Khel was by ancient use forbidden to any but the matriarch of Eirenseld—and that was not Asilay but her aunt, her mother’s sister, Arrowy el-Narronwy, eldest daughter of an eldest daughter in unbroken succession back to Oraay the Moon, the Daughter of the Night.

That little detail had not stopped her before. Arrowy was far from here in the king’s city of Teffan Lir, nor had she so much as set foot in a Geste in thirteen years, nor ever shown more than a token interest in the affairs of her clan. No, what slowed Asilay’s hand now was once again the breath of ghosts: Arrowy, second bride of the old Orthunder king Herumer, was the mother of Cherusay.

Arrowy, for all her self-preoccupation still not a witch to be trifled with, had had her suspicions about her daughter’s sea-cold death, and kept an unsleeping, though subtle, eye on her niece even now, knowing Asilay’s jealous hatred all too well. Asilay dropped Sarra Khel back into its furs lest any hint of what now burned in her be borne over the miles from the sacred blade to stir the coals of its lawful mistress’ interest. She closed the box and fixed its latch, slowly and resentfully. She had used Sarra Khel for so long—and Arrowy had never even touched it—it should be hers, she who cared, to use as and when she pleased. When Arrowy died at last—

—the knife, and the matriarchy of Eirenseld, passed to the eldest daughter of the eldest daughter. And that would be the brat-child Hautiger lost in Anstrede!

Asilay rocked on her knees, battling to master the spells of inner discipline to dam her rage and sluice it to her will. Springing once more to her feet, she let that fury roar into her warding-spells, to raise an unassailable castle of magical force about her work, that neither demon nor any resonance with Arrowy might pass. Blue fire licked up the eight pillars that closed her round and roiled beneath the dome high overhead. Away on the North-gate walk, a lone sentry, stomping dutifully through the piling slush, saw the glassy bubble glow like an eye, and he made the sigil against soul-capture, and then stomped on.

Spent of that first wave, once more Asilay took up Sarra Khel, to call on her mother Moon, and grandmother Night, the Well of Creation, to aid her; lighting the oil-soaked charcoal in her brazier, she summoned Sorche of the Flame and begged the strength she would need; with a fist of granite from the heart of the Dur Manthanor, she invoked Maolin the Earthshaker, that the ground the child walked would announce itself to her; and with the sweet cedar smoke she besought the Windlord to blow her towards blood like hers, towards all that was left of Cherusay alive upon the earth. And she added the curl of hair to the fire.

Then swiftly, with familiar ease, she slipped out to fetch the raven from its cage, pinning it in a hard grip against its wild struggles. Above the bowl on the altar, she snapped its neck, gutted it with the holy knife, drained blood and entrails into the bowl. Into the bloody cavity she tucked the manikin, closing it well in, winding it about with black silk threads. She swallowed its eyes, that its sight should be hers; drank just a taste of the blood in the bowl, and moved, fluttered nervelessly to a window and thrust it wide, as the spell began to grip.

Deep under the eaves of the Great Hall ravens huddled, unseen through the dark and the biting snow, but she felt them, knew them in her soul. Summoning all her furious power, she closed the spell and flung her spirit forth into the night.

A gaily clad man with a hat as blue as summer, in a place where he was no stranger at all, took a pull on his ale and stretched his feet to the fire gratefully. “Ah! My, that’s nice. I wonder what the poor folk are doing.”

An appreciative chuckle ran around the room at the old jest. One man only did not join the laughter, though he did allow a smile: the wolf-haired one standing taut as a bowstring on the hearthstone, impatient for the conclusion of the story. Blue-hat grinned up at the hot sapphire eyes that would have burned him away, leaving the tale revealed, if they could.

“But somehow I thought the one little girl’s remark the most telling,” he went on, serenely drawing out his narrative. “As I thought over all the father could tell me, the little one up and said, almost defiantly, and I quote:—”

“Yes?” snapped his victim, eyes flashing dangerously.

“‘I thought ‘she’ was pretty!’“

Ire vanished before surprise. The other men and the lone woman in the room stirred, and Wolf-hair murmured, “Now, that’s interesting.”

“Isn’t it?” Blue-hat grinned. “Children can be so bloody hard to fool. We should send all the students to practice before them.” Here he poked at the youngest of the group, a fluffy-headed young man of nineteen who looked far too mild to keep such dangerous company.

Cheerfully refilling Blue-hat’s plaintive mug, the youth smiled blandly. “I think we have enough to do—babysitting Masters.” He returned the mug with a pointed air.

This time even Wolf-hair added a harsh bark to the burst of indignant mirth. “Well answered! Tread warily, Peri,” he warned Blue-hat, “for you dance with one of my best.”

Peri froze with the ale but a hair away from touching his lips, and shot the best a glance of dark suspicion. The response was an easy laugh and a clear denial: “Peace, sir! It’s clean.”

“Kind of you,” Peri grunted amiably, and drank. “Mm—now you say you’ve had a similar tale from Anstrede?”

“Dunford.” Wolf-hair passed him a ribbon of parchment, and stalked across to thrust open the window while Peri extracted meaning from the jumbled-looking marks on the paper. Not a large man, Wolf-hair moved with a powerful grace reminiscent of hunting cats, or of a winter’s bonfire; and his air of treading at the breaking edge of dance enchanted warier minds than most of his enemies possessed. Even now Peri, Wolf-hair’s peer in most respects and with a piece of an intriguing puzzle in his hands, was briefly beguiled into watching as the simple act of pushing back a shutter became a gesture of immanent sensuality. The woman had hardly taken her eyes from him all evening, though she worked an embroidery; but those who knew the both of them generally attributed this to a desire to cover her back.

“Ho, ho—killed the one fellow and Marked the other, eh? And unquestionably a girl?” Peri put down the parchment and turned to the woman. “What are you of the Silver teaching your novices these days, Mistress? Even among the Black, Marking is—how shall I say?—something of an anachronism.”

The grim woman only shook her regal head slightly, but Peri was pleased to have caught, fleet as the crescent moon behind racing cloud, a wisp of smile. She was not one easily pleased, though he looked forward to making a more strenuous attempt, later on.

Wolf-hair laughed from the window, flashing a strong white smile under his dark moustache. “Windhome’s women are Death’s own mistresses,” he pointed out.

“Aye, but at dagger-play,” growled the lean man sitting in a limber knot, by preference on the hearth-rug. What dust might be there could make little difference to the care of his clothing, for he looked a proper beggar, and sported a black eye-patch. “Cúrullan there says a sword. Bit of an art, Marking with sword-tip. Can’t call to mind more than a few dozen of us who can, and but three who do.”

“But those three could be mistaken for ducks, if it suited them,” said the woman dryly, her low voice husky, soft, and ironic. She pulled a thread gently taut, her needle flashing like a tiny golden star.

“And I should hate to think they were at all accounted for,” Wolf-hair grinned more widely, to more laughter. “Whoever he is, though, I hope he has good reason for calling our hand—”

“—Without leaving so much as a hint of a sign—” Peri interrupted.

“—And alarming a town or two. I shall go to meet him.” Wolf-hair, long dark lashes veiling the blue fire of his eyes, glanced down at the woman with a curious smile. “Or, as it may be, her.”

The woman addressed as Mistress nodded back graciously, and, slowly curling the tip of her tongue to catch her silken thread, pulled it in, trapped the thread neatly between strong canines, and bit it through, a potent little dance that did not fail to quicken the pulse of every one of her companions. “Good idea.”