there. Haught. She’d remember.
Just as she was turning, a pebble skittered, a soft whicker cut the night. She
blinked-twice in one night, her best wards violated, slit like cobwebs? She’d
have to make the rounds tomorrow, set up new protections.
And then she concentrated on what was there: a horse, for certain; and a person
on it, a person drugged and tied to its saddle.
A present from this Haught. She’d have to thank him. She went out into her
garden of thornbush and nightshade, down to where the water mandrake threw
poisonous tubers high along the White Foal’s edge.
And there, in the luminous spill from the polluted river’s waves, she glimpsed
him. Niko, drugged to a stupor, or drunk-the same. Her heart wrenched, she ran
three steps, then calmed herself. He was here but not of his own will.
Fingers working a soft and silken spell, she half-danced toward him. Niko was
her beloved and yet her undoing lay within him. Seeing him was more the proof:
She wanted to take him, cut his bonds away, heal him and caress him. Not the
proper reaction for a witch. Not the proper motivation for Death’s Queen. She’d
sent for him, used Randal the mageling to lure him, but she dared not take him
now, not use him thus. Not when this Haught was obviously tempting her.
Not when Roxane had a war on her hands, a war of power with a necromant called
Ischade, a creature of night who might just have orchestrated this untimely
meeting.
So, while Niko, bent over his horse’s neck, slept on, she came up to the horse,
which flattened its ears but did not move away, cut the bonds that held the