It was the largest piece of what had been the globe. It was power. It had associated with fire, and flame was the element of her own magic, fire, and spirit. It was well it reside where it did; and it was best if no one in
Sanctuary were aware just where it resided.
Hoof-falls sounded outside, echoing off the walls of the warehouses which faced her little refuge, while the White Foal murmured its rain-swollen way past her back door. She closed her hand till flesh met flesh; and the blue stone was gone, magician’s trick.
She opened the outer gate for her visitor and opened the front door when she heard his steps on the porch. And looked around from where she sat as she heard him come in.
“Good evening,” she said. And when he stood there disregarding the invitation and too evidently in a hurry about their business together: “Come sit down-like my proper guest.”
“Magics,” he said in his lowest tone. “I’ll warn you, woman-“
“I thought-” She made her voice a higher echo of his, and with a taint of slow mockery: “I did think you were in better control than that.”
He stood there in the midst of her scattered silks, the littered carpet and scarf-strewn chairs. And she shut the door at his back, never stirring from where she sat. He stared at her, and a little spark of reckoning flickered in his eyes. Or it was the disturbance of the candles that sent shadows racing? “I did think your hospitality was better than this.”
The fire was there, inside her, it always was; and it stirred and grew in that way that, last night, should have sent her on the hunt. “I waited for you,” she said. “I’m quite at my worst.”