fortune-teller: Find me Roxane!”
“She is Death. Death in the meadow. Death on the path of waters-“
“There are no meadows in Sanctuary, woman! Concentrate!”
“In the quiet place. Death in the place of power.” The S’danzo’s eyes were shut.
Tears leaked from beneath her lashes. “Damage and reversal. It’s all I can see.
Witch, don’t touch my son.”
Ischade set the cup aside. Rose and gathered her cloak over her shoulder as the
S’danzo gazed up at her. She found nothing to say of comfort. “Randal’s with
them,” was the best that occurred to her.
She turned and went out the door. The power was still a tide in her blood, still
unabated. She inhaled it in the wind, felt it in the dust under her feet. She
could have blasted the house in her frustration, raised the fire in the hearth
and consumed the S’danzo and her man to ash.
It seemed poor payment for an innocent woman’s cup of tea. She banked the inner
fire and drank the wind into her nostrils and considered the daybreak.
“I can’t, I can’t, I can’t!” Moria cried, and went down the hall in a cloud of
skins and satin-till Haught caught her up, and took her by the arms and made her
look at him. Tears streaked Moria’s makeup. A curl tumbled from her coiffure.
She stared at Haught with blind, teared eyes and hiccuped.
“You’ll manage. You don’t have to say where I am or where I went.”
“Then take him with you!” She pointed aside to the study, where a dead man sat
drinking wine in front of her fire and getting progressively more inebriate.
“Get him out of here, I can’t do anything with the staff, they know what he is