on the long journey. He was still beautiful, but he was thinner and harder.
He touched her shoulder gently. She shrank away.
He saw the bloodstains on her collar. ‘You’re hurt!’ he said, startled.
‘Quartz!’
Quartz muttered sleepily from the bed. Chan tried to lead Wess over to the
window, where there was more light.
‘Just don’t touch me!’
‘Wess-‘
‘What’s wrong?’ Quartz said.
‘Wess is injured.’ Quartz padded barefoot towards them and Wess burst into tears
and flung herself into her arms.
Quartz held Wess, as Wess had held her a few nights before, when Quartz had
cried silently in bed, homesick, missing her children. ‘Tell me what happened,’
she said softly.
What Wess managed to say was less about the attack than about Lythande’s
explanations of it, and of Sanctuary.
‘I understand,’ Quartz said after Wess had told her only a little. She stroked
Wess’s hair and brushed the tears from her cheeks.
‘I don’t,’ Wess said. ‘I must be going crazy, to act like this!’ She started to
cry again. Quartz led her to the blankets, where Aerie sat up, blinking and
confused. Chan followed, equally bewildered. Quartz made Wess sit down, sat
beside her and hugged her. Aerie rubbed her back and neck and let her wings
unfold around them.
‘You aren’t going crazy,’ Quartz said. ‘It’s that you aren’t used to the way
things are here.’
‘I don’t want to get used to things here, I hate this place, I want to find
Satan, I want to go home.’
‘I know,’ Quartz whispered. ‘I know.’
‘But I don’t,’ Chan said.
Wess huddled against Quartz, unable to say anything that would ease the hurt she