Tasfalen turned on an elbow. “Damn-” he said, and that was all, as if more than
that had strangled somewhere in his chest.
Moria caught at her bodice, caught her clothing together against a chill in the
air that breathed through from the hall. A scent of incense had come in, heavy
and foreign, recalling the riverhouse so acutely that the present walls seemed
darkened and she seemed to be in that room, strewn with its gaudy silks and
hangings and the spoils of dead lovers….
“Moria,” Ischade said, in a voice that hardly whispered and yet filled all the
room. “You may go. Now.”
It was life and not instant extinction. It was an order that sent her wriggling
amongst the sheets and her rumpled petticoats as if there were hot irons behind
her. Tasfalen caught at her arm, and his fingers fell away as she reached the
edge of the bed and her bare feet hit the floor.
Ischade moved out of the doorway, and extended a dark-sleeved arm toward her
freedom and the hall.
Moria fled in a cloud of her undone clothing, barefoot down the stairs, not for
the downstairs hall but for the door, for anywhere, o gods, anywhere in all the
world but this house, Her servants. Her law-
It was not where Ischade would have chosen to be-here, standing in a doorway, in
a ludicrous Situation in her own house: because the uptown house was hers, and
Moria one of her more expensive servants who had considerably exceeded her
authority.
This man who sat half-naked and staring at her-this lord of Sanctuary and Ranke,
who lived his delicate life on the backs and the sweat of the downtown and the