pile of straw. “Are you all right? Your tongue? Your lips?”
He pushed himself up on his elbows. There wasn’t a muscle, bone, or nerve that
didn’t ache-as it always did after Stormbringer. But it was, he told her while
still trying to understand where he was and what had happened, nothing worse
than that.
“They say that my… Tempus would bite through his lip, or break a bone. I never
saw it. He wouldn’t notice it, really. You’re not him, though.”
“Kama?” Molin guessed.
He was in some crude shelter-a lean-to the shepherds used, by the smell of it.
The worst of the weather was deflected, anyway. She’d hung a lantern from the
center-pole but it didn’t provide much light and the priest had only seen
Tempus’s daughter a few times, mostly when she was considerably younger.
“I saw you stiffen up like that. I guessed what would happen. It wasn’t
Vashanka, was it?”
“No.”
She squatted down beside him; the lantern lifted her profile from the
surrounding darkness. She wore a youth’s leather tunic, laced tight and
revealing nothing. Her hair was twisted into a knot at the crown of her head and
was clinging to her face in damp tendrils where it had come loose. She shuddered
and went looking for her own cloak which, when she found it, was covered with
mud and useless from the rain.
“Did the others go on?” Molin asked.
Kama nodded. “They’ll have reached the palace by now. Strat knows I’m with you.
He won’t say anything.”
Molin looked into the lantern. He should, by right, stagger to his feet and hie
himself back to the palace. His life was full of gods, magic, and the intrigue