“Had we rich relations or a hidden villa surrounded by lakes and trees, I’d send you away. It’s Sanctuary herself who’s hurt you,” Dubro said with an eloquence few others knew he possessed.
Illyra imagined the villa and recognized it from her predawn vision of Trevya. Fresh sobs came loose within her as she shook herself free of the villa and her husband.
“What, then?” Dubro asked, a trifle less understanding.
“I don’t know. I don’t know . . .” but then, though she still could not discern the nature of, much less the solution to, her problems, Illyra stumbled across something that could, under different circumstances, have accounted for her despair. At least to Dubro.
“I woke this morning with a foreboding around me,” she admitted, not yet lying but working herself up to the sort of half-truths she routinely fed her visitors. “I thought to escape, but that woman came and the foreboding became a Seeing. She wanted to know where her lover had gone and I found him-in chains in the belly of a ship somewhere. And though I only Saw his face clearly, I saw as well that he was not alone and that many men had been pressed into slavery.”
Dubro grew thoughtful, as she had known he would. Chains were made from iron, and Dubro knew every man in Sanctuary who knew that metal-in any of its forms-against his flesh. The blue eyes grew un- focused as he, like any other ungifted suvesh, ordered and made sense of his thoughts.
Ulyra watched his pupils move as each mote of knowledge fell into place. Her sense of guilt lessened; she had tricked him into thinking about something else-but a good issue might yet come of it. She gath- ered her cards and wrapped them in a square of silk, never noting which ones had lain exposed.