Despite herself, she was doing the sorceress good service. For two days she had
been cleaning- straightening, scrubbing, sweeping away the thick layer of dust.
Already several baskets full of offal stood waiting for disposal beside Roxane’s
kitchen door.
But that was all that Gilla had accomplished. She had thought as furiously as
she had worked, but still she had no plan. She stood, leaning on her broom and
breathing heavily, gazing out through the dirty window and the oily shimmer of
the warding shield at the incessant rain.
“Rain fall up and down the town …” Snapper Jo said cheerfully. “Wash
everything away-shacks. Palace, all. All that fresh meat floating by …” he
added with a sigh.
“Don’t you smile about flooding-my children are in that town!” snarled Gilla.
She swallowed her instinctive appeal to the fiend’s nonexistent sympathy. His
only response to her pleas to help her escape had been a reiteration of Roxane’s
command to guard.
“Fat lady is a Mama? Snapper Jo never had Mama- poor Snapper Jo….” He gazed at
her with dim calculation in his mismatched eyes. “Fat lady be Snapper Jo’s
Mama!” he proclaimed triumphantly.
Gilla looked at that inane grin and shuddered. She thought of her children.
Wedemir had somehow turned into a warrior, and Vanda was growing into a beauty
that she herself had never had-those two, at least, could take care of
themselves now. Her next boy, Ganner, was still apprenticed to Herewick the
Jeweler, and with the streets so dangerous, she hardly ever saw him. She could