familiar, handsome face staring up at her with adoring eyes. At one breath it
drove her to rage that he was back, rage and fear and grief at once, for what he
was, and what a fool he was, and how handsome and how helpless in Her spells
which had somehow gone all amiss.
“Oh, damn!” She flung open the casement and leaned out, her corset-hard middle
leant across the sill and the compression of her ribs all but choking the wind
out of her as she set her palms on the rough stone. Cold wind stung her face and
her exposed front and blew her hair. Loose ribbons hit her in the face. “Go
away!” she cried. “Hasn’t my doorkeeper told you? Go away!”
The lord Tasfalen looked up with a flourish of his elegant hands, a glance of
his eyes that would melt a harder heart than an ex-thief’s. “My lady, forgive
me-no! Listen to me. I know a secret-“
She had started to pull back. Now she leaned there all dizzy in the wind, with
the air chilling her upper breasts and her bare arms, and her heart beating so
that the whole scene took on an air of unreality, as if something thrummed
unnaturally in her veins, as if the feeling that had come on her when Haught
touched her and turned her like this went on happening and happening and growing
in her, so that she was a danger and a Power herself, poor Moria of the gutters,
a candle to singe this poor lord’s wings, when a conflagration waited for him, a
burning that was Power of a scope to drink them both down….
“0 fool,” she moaned, seeing that face, hearing that word secret and that