by Anne Bishop
“And that fits in with the current infatuation with Hayllian memorabilia that might have some connection with Dorothea and her followers, and the whispers that a few aristo families want to bring Hayllian traditions to Dhemlan,” Surreal said.
“Every instinct I have, every minute of pain I experienced, tells me that Delora will be the next Dorothea if she isn’t stopped,” Daemon said. “If she was an adult, I wouldn’t hesitate to bury her in a deep grave, but there’s not enough proof to connect her to girls her age being broken.”
“As the ruler of Dhemlan, you can’t execute a child without that proof,” Lucivar said, sighing. “I’ve informed the Province Queens in Askavi that I’m holding them accountable for the safety of every young Queen, Black Widow, and Healer in their territories, as well as any witch who has the potential to wear a dark Jewel.”
Daemon nodded. “We’ve done the same. What Surreal and I have found is that witches who don’t have the potential to be rivals aren’t being targeted.”
“Are we pissing in the wind because we don’t like a group of snotty bitches, or should we believe what our instincts tell us, despite the lack of proof?” Lucivar asked.
“No way to know—yet.”
Surreal stared at her wineglass. “We know someone who might be able to confirm that the coven of malice is a real threat because she saw Dorothea’s rise to power.”
Daemon looked at Lucivar. “Tersa.”
Lucivar’s wings fanned out and resettled. “We’re tangled up in so much of what Dorothea did, do you think Tersa could tell us anything without confusing that rise to power with what came after?”
“Can’t be either of you,” Surreal said. “Can’t be me either for the same reason. We have too much history with Tersa.” She looked at Lucivar. “But Daemonar could tell her he’s worried about the attention some girls at school are giving his sister, and he needs to know the warning signs that Titian might be in danger. He won’t be asking about what happened to Tersa, not directly, so she might tell him something that will help us decide.”
“It might work,” Lucivar said. “But he’ll need another reason to go to the cottage in order to ease into talking to Tersa.”
Daemon smiled. “I know the perfect excuse.”
THIRTY-FOUR
Daemonar knocked on the front door of Tersa’s cottage and considered, again, how he should ask her about warning signs in order to get the information Lucivar and Daemon needed. Tersa rarely answered a question with an answer that seemed related to the question. You usually got a direct answer to “Do you want butter or jam on your toast?” but asking her about this? If she’d seen the warning signs, wouldn’t she have done something to protect herself from being broken?
Except . . . Tersa got her power back. Not in any usual way, and not in a way that enabled her to wear a Jewel. She had paid for regaining the Hourglass’s Craft with her sanity. The Darkness only knew what price she and the rest of the family would have to pay in order to receive the answer to his questions.
The door opened. Mikal scowled at him and said, “Hell’s fire. Now she’s sent you to pester me about the puppy?”
“The puppy is the excuse for me being here today,” Daemonar said quietly. “But give me something I can take back so that Jaenelle Saetien doesn’t pester me.”
Mikal continued to block the doorway. “Tersa is having some trouble holding on to the threads of daily life, and over the past couple of days, she’s been spending a lot of time in the attic. Something’s wrong. Don’t make it worse.”
“I’ll try not to, but Prince Sadi needs some answers.”
Mikal finally stepped back and muttered, “Good luck with getting those.” In a louder voice he added, “Well, come on back and meet them. Actually, it’s good you’re here. They haven’t seen an Eyrien.”
He followed Mikal to the kitchen. The puppies were in their basket. Two cute little bundles of fur who stared at this two-legged creature who was strange and might be frightening. Then . . .
Bark, bark, bark. Yap, yap, yap.
“This is Lord Shelby and Lady Breen,” Mikal said, raising his voice to be heard over the yapping. “Hush, you. This is Prince Daemonar.”
Nope. Not hushing.
He slowly spread his wings, knowing he would suddenly look different from any human they had seen.
They both cringed away from him, and there was silence for one, two, three . . .
Bark, bark, bark. Yap, yap, yap.
He wasn’t sure how they could have gotten louder. Remembering what Uncle Daemon had dryly referred to as a bribe for the female puppy, Daemonar folded his wings and crouched. Calling in the square of neatly folded linen with the initial S embroidered in one corner, he held it out to Breen.
Bark, bark . . . She stopped. Sniffed. Moved closer. Sniffed again. Moved closer.
All right. Odd way to make friends, but . . .
Breen latched her teeth into the handkerchief and tried to pull it out of his hand.
Mikal sighed and said on a psychic spear thread, *Let her have it.*
Daemonar moved his hand forward to loosen the tension on the cloth, then released it.
Having her prize, Breen sat in the basket with the handkerchief under her front paws. She growled at him, as if daring him to try to take it back.
Shelby sniffed his hand, but since he wasn’t carrying a scent the fuzzy Warlord found sufficiently interesting, Shelby settled down with the chew treat Mikal handed out to both pups.
He and Mikal retreated to the cottage’s sitting room.
“Is she going to let me take it back?” Daemonar asked. Uncle Daemon hadn’t said anything about letting the puppy keep the handkerchief.
Mikal laughed. “You want to find out just how possessive a Sceltie puppy who’s a witch can be, go ahead and try. At least a handkerchief is easier to replace than shirts and not as embarrassing as other things.”
Daemonar perched on the arm of a chair. “Oh?”
“Oh. I’ve heard stories. Morghann, the first Sceltie who was a special friend for Uncle Daemon, used to ‘acquire’ his shirt before Jazen could remove the used clothing. When Uncle Daemon’s scent faded, she’d go digging in the clothes for another shirt. Another of his special friends had a passion for socks, which made Jazen crazy because that Sceltie figured out how to stuff more socks into a sock and turn it into a sniff-and-chew toy.”
He. Would. Not. Laugh.
“The most difficult one was the Sceltie who developed a passion for Uncle Daemon’s underwear.”
His jaw was clenched so hard, he was going to break a tooth if he didn’t laugh.
“That one trotted into the study one afternoon when Uncle Daemon was meeting with some aristo Ladies. Let’s just say the underwear the pup retrieved from the clothes hamper wasn’t the sort to provide what could be called modest coverage.”
Daemonar snorted.
“No one had the spine to ask, but the Ladies wondering what kind of underwear Uncle Daemon had on that afternoon added some zing to the meeting.”
Daemonar burst out laughing. “You’re making that up.”
“Hand on heart,” Mikal said. “I heard this from a reliable source. More than one, actually. So you might mention to Jaenelle Saetien that when a Sceltie becomes someone’s special friend, he likes to keep something that belongs to her that holds her scent. Something that can be washed is a good idea.”
“I’ll tell her.” He felt a change in the air, the approach of fractured power. Keeping his movements casual, he stood and turned toward the door—and wondered if he should call in his war blade.
Mikal sucked in a breath.
Daemonar stared at Tersa, who looked back at him, at them, with no recognition.
She’s gone deep into the Twisted Kingdom. How do we get her back?
Then, belatedly, he realized the wet patch
es on her green dress came from her bleeding wrists. “Tersa!”
“No.” Her voice was guttural, feral. Mad. She moved toward a rectangular table that was positioned against the sitting room’s back wall.
*Fetch the Healer,* Daemonar told Mikal. *And tell Beale that Prince Sadi needs to come home now.*
Mikal hurried out of the sitting room. Daemonar moved toward Tersa. Carefully. Cautiously. Until she remembered who he was, he couldn’t help her—and even broken, she was formidable enough that he didn’t dare touch her.
Tersa pointed to the table’s empty surface, her blood dripping on the wood.
“Tersa, you hurt yourself. Will you let me put something on those wounds?”
“How many sides does a triangle have?”
“If I answer, will you let me help you?” How much blood had she lost before coming downstairs? How much time did they have before she lost too much?
“How many sides does a triangle have?”
Not an idle question, he realized. He placed his forefinger lightly on the wood. As he traced a triangle, he said, “Father, uncle, nephew.” He set his finger in the center of the triangle. “And the one who rules all three.”
She nodded. Then she pointed to the bottom side, the nephew side, of the triangle. “This one stands between, stands for the other two. They will be feared, but he is still young, still approachable. He will be the first blade in this fight. Not the deadliest, but his heart will make him the fiercest.”
He watched the blood drip, drip, drip from her wrists. “Tersa . . .”
“The boy must wait for the knife that will nick his heart. Then he will have the answer.”
The boy. Uncle Daemon. “All right. I’ll tell him.”
“You want to know about the girl who is gone.”
Daemonar hesitated, chilled by the warning she’d already given him.
She held out her arms. Daemonar breathed a sigh of relief and called in two clean handkerchiefs to bind the wounds.
“You want to know about the girl Tersa had been before she was Tersa.”
“Sure, but first . . .”
She stepped back, drew her arms out of reach. “The Tersa who is now can’t survive the telling. The boy must promise she won’t be forced to survive.” A beat of silence. “Choose.”
He stared at her. Choose what?
He knew. The knowledge made him sick, but he knew. If he let her bleed out and die, here and now, she would make the transition to demon-dead and be able to hold on to what was left of her sanity long enough to tell Daemon Sadi about two young witches named Tersa and Dorothea before one was broken because of the machinations of the other. And then Daemon Sadi, the High Lord of Hell, would be required to give his mother mercy and send that completely shattered witch to the final death so that she could become a whisper in the Darkness.
He could have an answer, or he could save the woman.
“There’s nothing more to talk about.” He took a step toward her. “Let me see your arms.” Between his father’s lessons and instructions from Nurian, the Eyrien Healer in Ebon Rih, he knew enough basic healing Craft to stanch the wounds and had them wrapped by the time the Healer arrived to do the full healing.
He helped the Healer escort Tersa up to her bedroom. Leaving them, he climbed the stairs to the attic and followed the blood trail to a worktable. His gorge rose as he looked at multiple tangled webs saturated with her blood.
This wasn’t normal. He knew enough about Black Widows and their Craft to know that much. What had she needed to see that had driven her to do this?
The spider silk hung from the wooden frames, the threads of the tangled webs of dreams and visions broken to keep other Black Widows from seeing what she had seen.
He wanted to clean the blood off the floor, off the stairs, off the table in the sitting room. He didn’t feel qualified to clear away the remnants of her tangled webs, and he admitted, with sorrow, that it would be better for Uncle Daemon to see everything before the cleanup.
Manny, who had been out and about the village, returned flustered and scared by this turn in Tersa’s mental instability. She sent Mikal next door for the pot of soup she’d made the previous day, and then went about making rolls to go with the soup. Then she sent him to the butcher’s for a roast she could cook and then slice wafer thin. Tersa preferred her meat in very thin slices.
While Manny agreed that they needed to leave the blood trail on the attic stairs and in the attic until Daemon saw it, she set Daemonar to work on cleaning up the blood in the sitting room. Helene, the housekeeper at the Hall, arrived with two of the footmen. They used Craft to lift the furniture so that she could take the bloodstained carpet back to the Hall to clean it.
When the puppies tried to climb the stairs to the bedrooms, he and Mikal took them up to Tersa’s room for a brief visit. She looked docile—and ill—but the puppies made her smile. The Healer assured them she would be all right, but she’d lost a lot of blood and needed to stay quiet for a few days.
When she fell asleep, they returned the puppies to the basket in the kitchen. Mikal went back upstairs to take the first watch.
Daemonar sat in the kitchen with Manny and waited for his uncle to arrive.
* * *
◆ ◆ ◆
It took Daemon an hour to remove the tangled webs from their wooden frames and burn the blood-saturated threads with witchfire. He made note of the spools of spider silk that were on the table and had been contaminated by blood, and burned those too. He would replace them in a few days.
He cleaned the wooden frames and scrubbed the blood off the worktable and the floor, using muscle until muscle alone wouldn’t remove the final stains. Then he used Craft to pull the blood from the wood in the table and floor.
She’d done this before Daemonar arrived at the cottage. Had she seen something in one of those webs that had told her why the boy was there? What else had she seen that she would require Daemonar to make such a terrible choice?
Once the room was clean and all the supplies needed for the Hourglass’s Craft were neatly put away, Daemon shrugged into his black tailored jacket, straightened the cuffs of his silk shirt, and went downstairs to hear the full accounting of what happened.
He listened without interrupting. Daemonar’s shaking hands were a reminder that the boy might be a man and a warrior, but he was still young. He’d held until it was safe to let go, to let someone else shoulder the burden.
“Did I make the right choice?” Daemonar asked.
Daemon stood and pulled his nephew into his arms. “There was no other choice to make, boyo.” And her warning about a knife in my heart is enough of an answer. We will hunt and we will fight, regardless of the cost.
The boy held on hard, his cheek pressed against Daemon’s shoulder. Then he whispered, “She scared me. Not just because she was bleeding that way. She didn’t sound like Tersa.”
Or maybe she did, Daemon thought. Maybe this was the Black Widow she would have been, the one who, even broken, had had the power and courage to look into a tangled web and see Witch being shaped by dreams and needs, rising out of the abyss. A feral intelligence. A midnight, sepulchral voice. It must have taken a certain kind of strength and madness to look at what was coming, all of what was coming. She’d done her best for me and Lucivar. She still did. And whoever she had been before she became what she is now? I’ll let that forgotten girl sleep. I must.
He held on to Daemonar, using a light soothing spell to comfort and help the boy relax.
“Do you want to stay at the Hall tonight?” Daemon asked.
The boy hesitated. “I’d like to go to Ebon Askavi, unless you need to be there.”
He needed to talk to Witch and Karla about what Tersa had done, but not tonight when his mother needed him here—and not when the boy needed to talk to his auntie J. “You go. And let your father kno
w when you arrive.” Lucivar would know the moment Daemonar returned to Ebon Rih, but there was no reason to get sloppy about courtesy.
“Yes, sir.” Daemonar loosened his hold and eased back enough to look at Daemon. “The knife that’s supposed to nick your heart. Do you think that was an image to represent an emotional wound or did she see an actual blade?”
Daemon brushed the boy’s hair away from his face and kissed his forehead before saying softly, “It doesn’t matter, does it? We will do what needs to be done.”
THIRTY-FIVE
He used to sprawl like that when he was little, but you’d think he’d learn to sleep more neatly at his age,” Karla said as she watched Daemonar. “The way those limp wings fan out, there will never be enough room for anyone else in his bed.”
“I slept with a grown man, an eight-hundred-pound Arcerian cat, and a Sceltie,” Witch replied. “I managed.”
“But they were all rather neat packages, despite the various sizes. He’s . . .” She waved a hand.
“I can hear you,” Daemonar mumbled.
Karla eyed the boy. She’d used a light hand with the sedative she’d put in the witch’s brew, but when he finally stopped talking and moving last night, he went down like a felled tree. And just as sprawled, with his limbs flopping every which way once he stretched out on the padded bench in the sitting room across from the Queen’s suite.
“Can you?” she asked doubtfully. “Your eyes aren’t open.”
“Funny thing about Eyriens. We don’t hear with our eyes.”
“Hmm.”
He rubbed his eyes and got them open. “Aren’t Healers supposed to know the difference between eyes and ears?”
“Same number of letters,” Witch said cheerfully. “And both words start with e. Not that hard to confuse one with the other.”
He groaned. “Please, Auntie J. It’s too early for you both to be playful.”
Karla looked at Witch. “I think he’s awake.” She leaned over to bring her face in line with the boy’s and smiled brightly. “Kiss kiss.”