with her arms about the bottom newel-post and stared helplessly at Stilcho and
stared at the man who was dying on her hall rug. Stilcho had gotten the shaft
broken. The remnant of the arrow stood in the wound, with bloodstained flesh
swelling it in tight. High in the ribs with bone to help lock it up and gods
knew what it had hit. “0 gods, gods, he’s done, isn’t he?”
Stilcho held up the fletching-end of the arrow from beside him. It had been
dipped in blue dye. “Jubal,” he said.
She felt a twinge of chill. Jubal was another who had owned a piece of her soul,
once. Before Ischade took her and set her in this house that no longer seemed
safe from anything. “You know how to pull it?” she asked.
“I know how. I don’t know what I’m cutting into. Your staff-that cook of yours
ran back in the kitchen after another knife. I need two to get on either side of
this thing. I need waddings and I need hot oil. Can you get them moving back
there?”
“They’ve locked themselves in the cellar, that’s where they are!” The silence
out of the servants’ end of the house suddenly interpreted itself and filled her
with blind rage. She knew her staff. She flung herself from the newel-post and
started down the hall.
And screamed as a light and a thunderclap burst into the drawing-room beyond the
arch beside them. Wind hit her.
She turned and saw Haught there, Haught disheveled and without his cloak, and
holding a pottery sphere in his hands, a sphere that by odd seconds seemed not
to be there at all and at others seemed to spin and glow.