And she was blind.
Knowing that, she came here, after a fruitless murder and a night’s searching
all of Sanctuary for Roxane’s traces….
… To find the traces Roxane left on the future.
A light burned inside the little shop. So someone was astir this dawn. She
rapped at a door she might have opened, waited like any suppliant at the fane.
Heavy steps came to it; someone opened the peephole and looked out and shut it
rapidly.
She knocked a second time. And heard a higher voice than belonged with that
tread, before the bar thumped back and the door opened inward.
The S’danzo Illyra stood to meet her, and that shadow to the side was Dubro, was
a very distraught Dubro; and Illyra’s face was tearstreaked. The S’danzo wrapped
her fringed shawl about her as at-some ill wind sweeping through her door.
“So the news has come here,” Ischade said in a low voice; and was pricklingly
conscious of Dubro to the side. She forced herself to calm, concentrating on
the woman only, on a mother’s aching grief. “A mage is with your son since
last night, S’danzo; I would be, but my talents are-awry tonight. Perhaps later.
If they need me.”
“Sit down.” Illyra made a feverish movement of her hands, and Dubro cleared a
bench. “I was making tea….” Perhaps the S’danzo conceived this as a visit of
condolence, some sign of hope; she wiped at her eyes with brisk moves of a thin
hand and turned to her stove, where a pot boiled. It was placatory hospitality.
It was something else, perhaps.
“You see hope for your son in me?”
“I don’t See Arton. I don’t try.” The S’danzo poured boiled tea through a