"Tersa, where is Daemon?"
Tersa blinked, drew a shuddering breath. She stared at him, frowning. "The boy's name is Mikal."
He wanted to shout at her,Where's my son? Why hasn't he gone to the Keep or come through one of the Gates? What's he waiting for? Useless to shout at her. She couldn't translate what she'd seen any better than she had. One thing he did understand. All the threads were not yet in place. Until they were, all he could do was wait.
"What are the sticks for, Tersa?"
"Sticks?" Tersa looked at the basket of sticks in the corner of the kitchen. "They have no purpose." She shrugged. "Kindling?"
She withdrew from him, exhausted by the effort of keep-nig the stones of reality and madness from grinding her soul.
"Is there anything I can do for you?" he asked, preparing to leave.
Tersa hesitated. "It would anger you."
Right now, he didn't feel capable of that strong an emotion. "It won't anger me. I promise."
"Would you . . . Would you hold me for a minute?"
It rocked him. He, who had always craved physical affection, had never thought to offer her an embrace.
He closed his arms around her. She wrapped her arms around his back and rested her head on his shoulder.
"I don't miss the rutting, but it feels good to be held by a man."
Saetan gently kissed her tangled hair. "Why didn't you mention it before? I didn't know you wanted to be held."
"Now you do."
2 / Kaeleer
The Dark Council whispered.
At first it was only a thoughtful look, a troubled frown. The High Lord had done many things in his long life—look what he'd done to the Council itself in order to become the girl's guardian—but it was hard to believe he was capable ofthat. He had always insisted that the strength of a Territory, the strength of the Realm, depended on the strength of its witches, especially its Queens. To think he would do such things with a vulnerable girl, a dark young Queen . . .
Oh, yes, they had inquired about the girl before now, but the High Lord had always responded tersely. The girl was ill. She could have no visitors. She was being privately tutored.
Where had the girl been during the past two years? What had she been subjected to? Was Jorval sure?
No, Lord Jorval insisted, he was not sure. It was only a spurious rumor made by a dismissed servant. There was no reason to suspect it wasn't just as the High Lord had said. The girl probablywas ill, an invalid of some kind, perhaps too emotionally or physically fragile for the stimulation of visitors.
The High Lord had made no mention of the girl being ill until the Council requested to see her the first time.
Jorval stroked his dark beard with a thin hand and shook his head. There was no evidence. Only the word of a man who couldn't be found.
Murmurs, speculations, whisssspers.
3 / The Twisted Kingdom
He clung to the sharp grass on the crumbling island ofmaybe and watched the sticks float toward him. They were evenly spaced like the boards of a rope bridge strung across the endless sea. But the footing would be precarious at best, and there were no ropes to hang on to. If he tried to use them, he would sink beneath the vast sea of blood.
He was going to sink anyway. The island continued to crumble. Eventually there wouldn't be enough left to hold him.
He was tired. He was willing to let it suck him down.
The sticks broke formation, swirled and re-formed, swirled and re-formed over and over again into rough letters.
You are my instrument.
Words lie. Blood doesn't.
Butchering whore.
He tried to scramble away from that side of the island, but the other side kept crumbling, crumbling. There was only enough room now for him to lie there, helpless.
Something moved beneath the sea of blood, disturbing the sticks and their endless words. The sticks swirled around his small island, bumped against the crumbling
edges ofmaybe, and piled up against each other to form a fragile, protective wall.
He leaned over the edge and watched the face float upward, sapphire eyes staring at nothing, golden hair spread out like a fan.
The lips moved.Daemon.
He reached down and gently lifted the face out of the sea of blood. Not a head, just a face, as smooth and lifeless as a mask.
The lips moved again. The word sounded like the sigh of the night wind, like a caress.Daemon.
The face dissolved, oozed through his fingers.
Sobbing, he tried to hold it, tried to re-form it into that beloved face. The harder he tried, the quicker it slipped through his fingers until there was nothing left.
Shadows in the bloody sea. A woman's face, full of compassion and understanding, surrounded by a mass of tangled black hair.
Wait,she said.Walt. The threads are not yet in place.
She vanished in the ripples.
Finally, there was an easy thing to do, a thing without pain, without fear.
Making himself as comfortable as possible, he settled down to wait.
4 / Kaeleer
Saetan wondered if there was something wrong with the bookcases behind his desk or if there was something wrong with his butler, because Beale had been staring at the same spot for almost a minute.
"High Lord," Beale said stiffly, still staring at the bookcases.
"Beale," Saetan replied cautiously.
"There's a Warlord to see you."
Saetan carefully set bis glasses on top of the papers covering his desk, and folded his hands to keep them from shaking. "Is he cringing?"
Scale's lips twitched. "No, High Lord."
Saetan sagged in his chair. "Thank the Darkness. At least he's not here because of something the girls have done."
"I don't believe the Ladies are involved, High Lord."
"Then send him in."
The Warlord who entered the study was a head taller than Saetan, twice as wide, and solid muscle. His hands were big enough to engulf a man's skull and strong enough to crush one. He looked like a rough man who would wrench what he wanted from the land or from other people. But beneath that massive body and roaring voice was a heart filled with simple joy and a soul too sensitive to bear harsh treatment.
He was Dujae. Five hundred years ago, he had been the finest artist in Kaeleer. Now he was a demon.
Saetan knew it was hypocritical to be angry with Dujae for coming here since Mephis, Andulvar, and Prothvar were all frequently in residence at the Hall since Jaenelle had returned with him, and they all had contact with the children. Even so, keeping the Dark Realm separated from the living Realms had always been a knife-edged dance, and he was uncomfortably aware that, even when living, he'd straddled that line. Now with all the children spending the summer at the Hall and the Dark Council pressuring him for an interview with Jaenelle, having demons coming into Kaeleer for an audience with him was beyond tolerance.
"Twice a month I hold an audience in Hell for any who wish to come before me," he said coldly. "You've no business here, Lord Dujae."
Dujae stared at the floor, his long, thick fingers pulling at the brim of the shabby blue cap he held in his hands. "I know, High Lord. Forgive me. I should not have come here, but I could not wait."
Saetan could, and did.
Dujae crushed the cap in his hands. When he finally looked up, there was only despair in his eyes. "I am so tired, High Lord. There is nothing left to paint, no one to teach, to share with. No purpose, no joy. There is nothing. Please, High Lord."
Saetan closed his eyes, his anger forgotten. It happened sometimes. Hell was a cold, cruel, blasted Realm, but it
had its measure of kindness. It was a place where the Blood could make peace with their lives, a suspended time to take care of unfinished business. Some did nothing with that last gift, enduring weeks or years or centuries of tedium before finally fading into the Darkness. Others embraced that time to nurture talents they'd ignored while living or chosen to forsake in order to follow another road. Others, cut off before they were finished, continued as they had lived. Dujae had died in his prime, suddenly, unexpectedly. When he realized he could still paint, he had accepted being demon-dead with a joyous heart.
Now he was asking Saetan to release him from the dead flesh, to consume the last of his psychic strength and let him become a whisper in the Darkness.
It happened sometimes. Not often, thankfully, but sometimes the desire to continue faded before the psychic strength. When that happened, a demon came to him and asked for a swift release. And because he was the High Lord, he honored those requests.
Saetan opened his eyes and blinked hard to clear his vision. "Dujae, are you sure?"
"I'm—"
Karla exploded into the room. "That overbearing, overdressed, overscented sewer rat says my drawing is deficient!" Her eyes filled with tears as she flung a sketch pad onto Saetan's desk.
He vanished his glasses before the sketch pad landed on them.
"He's a grubby-minded prick," Karla wailed. "This isn't my life's work, this isn't my road. This is supposed to be fun!"
Saetan surged out of his chair. There had been so many tutors coming and going in the past three weeks he couldn't remember this particular ass's name, but if the man could reduce Karla to tears, he was probably shredding Kalush and Morghann, to say nothing of Jaenelle.
Dujae reached for the sketch pad.
"No!" Karla dove for the pad, too upset to remember she could vanish it before Dujae's hand closed around it.
Her forehead hit Dujae's arm. She stumbled backward
into Saetan. He wrapped his arms around her and ground his teeth, hating the anguish pouring out of her.
Dujae studied the sketch. He shook his head slowly. "This is terrible," he rumbled, flipping the pages back to earlier sketches. "Obscene," he roared. He shook the sketch pad at Karla. "You call him sewer rat? You are too kind, Lady. He's a—"
"Dujae," Saetan warned, first to prevent Dujae from possibly teaching Karla a pithy phrase she didn't already know and second because he'd felt Karla perk up.
Dujae looked at Saetan and took a deep breath. "He is not a good instructor," he finished lamely.