streaked white on the black curls. They called her Star, my sister did and the
maid. And I came back to Sanctuary -‘ Samlor raised his eyes and his voice,
neither angry but as hard and certain as a sword’s edge’- to this hell-hole, to
find my niece. Reia had married here, a guardsman, and she’d stayed after the
after what happened when my sister died. And she’d kept Star like one of her
own, she told me, until a month ago, and the child disappeared, no one to say
where.
‘That’s how late I was, lady,’ the Cirdonian went on in a wondering voice. ‘Just
a month. But I will find Star. And I’ll find any one or any thing that’s harmed
the child before then.’
‘You’ve brought something of the girl’s for me to touch, then?’ said Illyra.
Professional calm had reasserted itself in her voice as she approached her task.
This was the crystalline core on which all the mummery, all the ‘dark strangers’
and ‘far journeys’ were based.
‘Yes,’ said Samlor, calm again himself. With his right hand, his knife hand, he
held out a medallion like the one around his own neck. ‘It’s a custom with us in
Cirdon, the birth-token consecrating the newborn to Heqt’s bounty. This was
Star’s. It was found in the mews of the barracks where she lived. Another child
picked it up, a friend, so she brought it to Reia instead of keeping it
herself.’
Illyra’s hand cupped the grinning face of Heqt, but her eyes glanced over the
ends of the thong that had suspended the medallion. The surface of the leather
was dark with years of sweat and body oils, but its core at the ends was a clear