by Anne Bishop
“Will any of the other girls report the destruction of their work?”
“Not likely,” Titian said, vanishing the handkerchief. “They’d be afraid to draw the coven of malice’s attention.”
Lucivar looked at Daemonar, who said, “Yeah. Them.”
Shit. Did that mean Jaenelle Saetien had had some part of that meanness?
Daemon walked out of the pottery shed.
“Stay with them,” Lucivar told his son.
“Yes, sir.”
He covered the short distance between him and his brother. “Did you find out who did this?”
“I did,” Daemon replied.
“What are we going to do about it?”
“You’re going to pay a visit to Lady Zhara and inform her that I would like Lord Weston and two of Zhara’s guards on duty here at the school to discourage any further mischief. They can make use of Daemonar’s room in the male dormitory for resting periods, although he’ll have to let them in since the room has shields and a Green lock on the door.” Daemon smiled a cold, cruel smile. “I’m going to the Keep. I need a little assistance on a project.” A pause. “This is a punishment, Prick, not an execution.”
This time. That was the part that didn’t need to be said. Not between them.
“I’ll stay at the town house tonight, but I’ll be heading back to Ebon Rih at first light. My men need to know there might be trouble ahead.”
“Can our young Brother keep Zoey contained?”
An acknowledgment that Daemonar was one side of the triangle ruled by Witch. “He’ll keep her contained.”
“Good.”
Their shoulders brushed as Daemon walked past him—and then faded away.
Lucivar returned to the children and looked at Daemonar. “You’re standing escort until Lord Weston and the guards arrive.”
“Yes, sir,” Daemonar replied.
“Weston wasn’t needed on school grounds,” Zoey protested.
“He wasn’t needed,” Lucivar agreed. “Now he is.”
“But . . .”
He turned to her, spreading his wings and curving them to separate Zoey from his children. Then he said quietly, “If Lord Weston isn’t willing to teach you how to use a knife, I will.”
She stared at him, then whispered, “It was just some broken pottery.”
“This time. What about next time?”
She swallowed hard. “Daemonar is here every day. Could he start teaching me the basics?”
“I’ll talk to him about that.” The girl was not a fool, and he could see why Daemon wanted to nurture her potential as a Queen. “I’ll inform the authority here about the broken pottery. You and Titian should get to your classes.”
“We had a free afternoon, but Daemonar is supposed to be at one of his tutorials soon. We’ll sit with him so he doesn’t miss out.”
That consideration confirmed that she had the potential to be a good Queen.
Folding his wings, he informed Daemonar and Titian of the new plans for the afternoon, then followed his son when the boy stepped away from the girls.
“Prince Sadi is taking care of this?” Daemonar tipped his head toward the pottery shed.
“He is. And may the Darkness have mercy on whoever was responsible.”
He just hoped that Jaenelle Saetien wasn’t going to be among the ones who needed that mercy.
* * *
◆ ◆ ◆
Arriving at the Keep, Daemon made his formal requests through the Seneschal, alerting the two Black Widow Queens in residence that his need to see them came from duty. Then he began setting up his tools and supplies on a table in the sitting room across from the Queen’s suite. Wooden frame, spider silk . . . and seven pieces of broken pottery.
“Kiss kiss,” Karla said as she and Witch walked into the sitting room.
“I need your assistance in shaping a punishment.” He looked at Witch. “With your permission, Lady?”
She nodded.
He reached for both their minds, then opened his first inner barrier and showed them the images—and emotions—he had drawn from the pottery shed.
More than petty cruelty, although there had been enough of that laced with fear. There also had been a kind of malice that had a familiar feel. Harm for the pleasure of doing harm. An almost lustful glee in forcing others to rape their own honor because they weren’t strong enough to stand up for themselves—or were too afraid of what would happen if they did.
If he hadn’t been at the school that day, Lady Fharra could have dismissed the incident as malicious mischief and either searched for those responsible or pretended it wasn’t significant enough to bother with. But he had been there that day, and he’d drawn the images out of wood and stone.
Taking their age into account, he would give the girls a warning and lesson.
The room turned very cold. Since Witch had no physical body and Karla was demon-dead, he wondered if he was the only one who felt this manifestation of his rage.
He closed his inner barrier and waited as they approached the table and studied the pieces of pottery.
“What did you have in mind?” Karla asked.
He told them.
“This is permanent?” Witch asked.
“No. If it was permanent, I could do it on my own.” And he wouldn’t need to work with a tangled web to extract the price owed for the destruction. “I would like this to be temporary and for a very specific amount of time. I don’t have the delicacy of skill to do that.”
Karla smiled at him, then looked at Witch. “He’s become quite terrifying when he’s pissed off.”
“He always was.” Witch returned Karla’s smile, but the icy rage Daemon saw in her sapphire eyes reminded him that he was not the most terrifying individual in the room.
The smile he gave them in return was equally sharp, equally cold—and it delighted him to be in their presence. “Shall we begin?”
TWENTY-FIVE
Jaenelle Saetien fell halfway out of bed as she tried to kick off the covers and turn on the bedside lamp. For a moment, she thought it had been a bad dream. Then she heard more screams.
She ran out of her room in the dormitory, then stopped. Girls were hovering in the hallway like little animals that were reluctant to move too far from their burrows.
More screams.
Not knowing what else to do, Jaenelle Saetien headed for Delora and Hespera, who stood in front of Amara’s door, looking frightened and furious.
“What happened?” she asked as a scream changed to a wail behind the door. “Is Amara hurt? Should I fetch the school Healer?”
The door opened. Borsala and Leena guided Amara out of the room.
Jaenelle Saetien stared at Amara’s hands. Not only were the hands clenched so tightly the fingernails were cutting into the palms; they were curled inward to such a degree it was a wonder that something in Amara’s wrists didn’t tear from the strain.
Tacita came out of another room, leading Dahlia, a girl who had been on the periphery of their little group. Her hands were fisted and curled like Amara’s.
Other girls were led from their rooms, their hands useless.
Someone must have alerted the school’s Healer because now there were shocked adult voices mingling with the cries and wails.
Once the afflicted girls were taken to the healing rooms and the dormitory settled into a wary quietness, Jaenelle Saetien felt the fury pumping out of Delora and followed the other girl’s line of sight—to Titian, who looked shocked, and Zoey, who looked stunned and yet not completely surprised.
“What did you do?” Delora snarled, taking a step closer to Zoey.
“Nothing.” Zoey faced Delora. “But they must have done something.”
“Couldn’t keep your mouth shut, could you, fat bat?” Hespera said, spitting the words
at Titian. “Had to go whining about a little teasing.”
Jaenelle Saetien looked at her friends, then at her cousin. Titian had been upset about something that had happened at the pottery shed yesterday, and Papa and Uncle Lucivar had been quite angry about it. But Delora and Hespera said it wasn’t anything significant and asking Titian about it would give the girl notions of being important beyond her scope. So she hadn’t crossed the green to where her cousins and Zoey had stood. She hadn’t asked what happened. She couldn’t be blamed if she didn’t know.
And she wasn’t going to ask who had shaped the punishment for whatever had happened in the pottery shed.
Not wanting to be pulled into taking sides between Zoey and Delora, Jaenelle Saetien hurried back to her room—and wondered whether things would have been different this morning if her father and uncle hadn’t been at the school yesterday.
* * *
◆ ◆ ◆
Daemon hadn’t gotten more than a couple of hours of sleep between finishing the tangled web that held the punishment spell and returning to Amdarh—and the school.
After he activated the spell, there was nothing more for him to do except wait for Lady Zhara’s request for an audience.
Helton was startled to find him walking into the town house shortly after dawn, but there was coffee available since Lucivar had left for Ebon Rih barely a quarter of an hour earlier. Apparently, Daemonar had chosen to remain at the school last night to give Lord Weston a hand at squelching any trouble, should any arise.
That told him Zhara had taken her little chat with Lucivar seriously.
He had his first cup of coffee while reviewing the correspondence that had been left on his desk. He enjoyed the second cup in the dining room while he tucked into a hearty breakfast.
The urgent knocking on the town house’s front door came as he finished the last bite. A message from Lady Zhara.
He didn’t rush—he was the Warlord Prince of Dhemlan, after all—but he didn’t make the Queen of Amdarh wait long before he arrived at her home and was escorted into the morning room, where Zhara and the court Healer waited for him.
“Ladies,” he said pleasantly.
“There has been a troubling occurrence at the school,” Zhara said. “Zoey was shaken by it and wasn’t making a lot of sense when she contacted me on a psychic thread, but from the report Lord Weston provided, I gathered some girls were mysteriously injured.”
“Ah.” Daemon took a seat and crossed his legs at the knees. “Guilt can manifest itself in odd ways. Physical ways. Perhaps the girls who are afflicted were involved in some intended cruelty and are now paying the price. Perhaps your Healer could suggest to the school’s Healer that such an affliction in girls that age is temporary, although restoring the hands to their full use will probably be painful.”
He watched the muscles in Zhara’s throat work.
“This affliction is temporary?” she asked.
He smiled. “This time.”
A clock in the room ticked, ticked, ticked while he waited.
“If it’s temporary . . .” The Healer stopped, then seemed to gather her courage. “Do you know how long this affliction lasts?”
“About seven days,” he replied, his voice still brutally pleasant.
Tick, tick, tick.
“Thank you for the information, Prince,” Zhara finally said. “We’ll make sure it’s passed on to the school.”
He rose and bowed to Queen and Healer. “Ladies.”
He’d almost reached the morning room’s door when Zhara said, “Prince? Zoey sent a note yesterday afternoon, telling me that the gift she’d been making for her mother had been among the work that had been destroyed in the pottery shed. Including Zoey and Titian, how many girls had their work damaged?”
He looked back at her and said too softly, “Seven.”
TWENTY-SIX
For seven days, Amara and the other girls afflicted with Curling Hands had needed help getting dressed. They’d needed help being fed, blowing their noses, wiping their asses.
Disgusting.
Delora knew the source of that spell. Oh, yes, she knew. No one in the school, instructors included, had the skill to do something like what was done to Amara and the other afflicted girls, so that left two possibilities. One, really, since the girls hadn’t had their hands chopped off.
Prince Sadi’s interference had cost her the loyalty of her second-tier followers. Girls like Dahlia, whom she’d been breaking down bit by bit since they were girls—since the day they’d searched for the missing kitten. Now, on the eighth day, as the muscles and tendons in their hands started to relax, she saw the moment the girls who had been in the pottery shed with Amara realized this had been a specific punishment for a specific bit of mischief—and fear of another round of punishment from someone brutal enough to do this to them would remain stronger than fear of whatever she might inflict on them for losing her favor.
She blamed Zoey the Insipid and the fat bat for boo-hooing to the grown-ups about a little bit of fun. Now there were guards patrolling the school, maintaining enough distance around those two girls to give the illusion they were on their own but never letting them out of their sight. Hell’s fire, that Lord Weston even stood guard outside the facilities in the girls’ dorm. When she and several other girls complained to Lady Fharra about it, they’d been told the order came from the Queen of Amdarh herself, so the girls should make sure their robes were sufficiently modest when they left their rooms to take a shower.
The first time they spotted Weston on guard, Leena and Tacita had worn attire that was less than modest to test the possibility of providing a distraction. They had returned to their rooms thoroughly withered by a disinterest that bordered on contempt.
It wasn’t Weston or the guards they needed to distract. It wasn’t those men she needed to punish for the sudden cracks in her careful plans that could spoil all her lovely dreams of power—the kind of power that had once controlled the Territory of Hayll and then had brought the whole Realm of Terreille to its knees. She wanted that. She could do that.
But she needed to start weakening a particular adversary or two.
Delora summoned Hespera, Borsala, and Krellis. They stood in plain sight on the green, where other students and the instructors could see them.
“Krellis found out something delicious, and now it’s time to put it to use,” Delora said. “This is what I want you to do.”
This would teach Prince Sadi to keep his nose out of her business.
* * *
◆ ◆ ◆
Jaenelle Saetien didn’t understand the odd looks she’d received throughout the morning or the way so many of the students scattered when she went in for the midday meal. Delora and her other friends weren’t in the dining room, and when she sat down at a table, Delora’s and Hespera’s wannabe friends picked up their plates and found somewhere else to sit.
Her table filled up with what Hespera called the school dregs—the girls who were barely qualified to be with girls from real aristo families. The last two places at the table were taken by Zoey and Titian.
“Did something happen?” Jaenelle Saetien asked. She glanced toward the door. Sure enough, one of the guards had taken up a position where he could keep Zoey in sight.
No sign of Daemonar. She wondered if that was good or bad. He’d been a little testy lately, and it was annoying.
“The coven of malice has been whispering about something all morning, but I don’t know what it’s about,” Zoey replied.
“I think some of the instructors know,” Titian said. “One of them told me I shouldn’t believe everything I hear.” She hesitated. “I think the instructors do believe it, but they’re afraid.”
“Of what?” She suddenly wondered if they were afraid of a what or a who.
Jaenelle Saetien ate because she was hungry, but the food
filled her stomach with a sour, churning burn, so she abandoned the meal, said good-bye to Zoey and Titian, and went looking for Delora.
Tacita, Leena, Borsala, and Hespera gave her pitying looks but slipped away before she got too close. Only Delora waited for her on the edge of the green.
“You’re being so brave,” Delora said. “I’m sure I couldn’t be so brave and go to classes with everyone talking about how your mother . . .” She pressed her lips together. “No. We’re friends, so I’m not going to say.”
“Say what? Delora, what is it everyone else knows?”
“I only found out this morning, or I would have told you so that it wouldn’t be so much of a shock.” Delora sighed. “Someone heard the adults talking at a party a couple of days ago and told a friend who told a friend—and now everyone knows. I’m surprised Titian didn’t tell you, her being family and all. Then again, maybe she’s ashamed and didn’t want to talk about it.”
“Talk about what?” Jaenelle Saetien made a huge effort to rein in her impatience. “What do you know about my mother?”
* * *
◆ ◆ ◆
Jaenelle Saetien dropped from the Purple Dusk Wind to the landing web in front of SaDiablo Hall. Maybe she would have taken a moment to gather her thoughts and leash her feelings so that she could discuss this with her father like an adult and let him know she would stand by him if he chose to divorce that woman, but that woman stood in the open doorway of her home, wearing one of those long coat-and-trouser outfits that she often wore when she went to the village or was “working” as her father’s second-in-command.
At least, that was the kind of “work” her father believed was being done.
But seeing that woman snapped her control.
“YOU!” she screamed.
Surreal gave her a long look, then turned and walked into the Hall. Into her father’s home.