"Why?" Andulvar asked suspiciously.
"Because you're going to help me train a seven-year-old Witch who's got the raw power right now to turn us both into dust and yet"—he dropped the shoe onto the chair— "is abysmal at basic Craft."
Mephis knocked briskly and entered the study, tripping on a pile of books. "A demon just told me the strangest thing."
Saetan adjusted the folds of his cape and reached for his cane. "Be brief, Mephis. I'm going to an appointment that's long overdue."
"He said he saw the Hall shift a couple of inches. The whole thing. And a moment later, it shifted back."
Saetan stood very still. "Did anyone else see this?" "I don't think so, but—"
"Then tell him to hold his tongue if he doesn't want to lose it."
Saetan swept past Mephis, leaving the study that had been his home for the past decade, leaving his worried demon-dead son behind.
1 / Terreille
In the autumn twilight, Saetan studied the Sanctuary, a forgotten place of crumbling stone, alive with small vermin and memories. Yet within this broken .place was a Dark Altar, one of the thirteen Gates that linked the Realms of Terreille, Kaeleer, and Hell.
Cassandra's Altar.
Cloaked in a sight shield and a Black psychic shield, Saetan limped through the barren outer rooms, skirting pools of water left by an afternoon storm. A mouse, searching for food among the fallen stones, never sensed his presence as he passed by. The Witch living in this labyrinth of rooms wouldn't sense him either. Even though they both wore the Black Jewels, his strength was just a little darker, just a little deeper than hers.
Saetan paused at a bedroom door. The covers on the bed looked fairly new. So did the heavy curtains pulled across the window. She would need those when she rested during the daylight hours.
At the beginning of the half-life, Guardians' bodies retained most of the abilities of the living. They ate food like the living, drank blood like the demon-dead, and could walk in the daylight, though they preferred the twilight and the night. As centuries passed, the need for sustenance diminished until only yarbarah, the blood wine, was required. Preference for darkness became necessity as daylight produced strength-draining, physical pain.
He found her in the kitchen, humming off-key as she took a wineglass out of the cupboard. Her shapeless, mud-colored gown was streaked with dirt. Her long braided hair, faded now to a dusty red, was veiled with cobwebs. When she turned toward the door, still unaware of his presence, the firelight smoothed most of the lines from her face, lines he knew were there because they, were in the portrait that hung in his private study, the portrait he knew so well. She had aged since the death that wasn't a death.
But so had he.
He dropped the sight shield and psychic shield.
The wineglass shattered on the floor.
"Practicing hearth-Craft, Cassandra?" he asked mildly, struggling to tamp down an overwhelming sense of betrayal.
She backed away from him. "I should have realized she'd tell you."
"Yes, you should have. You also should have known I'd come." He tossed his cape over a wooden chair, grimly amused at the way her emerald eyes widened when she noticed how heavily he leaned on the cane. "I'm old, Lady. Quite harmless."
"You were never harmless," she said tartly.
"True, but you never minded that when you had a use for me." He looked away when she didn't answer.
"Did you hate me so much?"
Cassandra reached toward him. "I never hated you, Saetan. I—"
—
was afraid of you.
The words hung between them, unspoken.
Cassandra vanished the broken wineglass. "Would you like some wine? There's no yarbarah, but I've got some decent red."
Saetan settled into a chair beside the pine table. "Why aren't you drinking yarbarah?"
Cassandra brought a bottle and two wineglasses to the table. "It's hard to come by here."
"I'll send some to you."
They drank the first glass of wine in silence.
"Why?" he finally asked.
Cassandra toyed with her wineglass. "Black-Jeweled Queens are few and far between. There was no one to help me when I became Witch, no one to talk to, no one to help me prepare for the drastic changes in my life after I made the Offering." She laughed without humor. "I had no idea what being Witch would mean. I didn't want the next one to go through the same thing."
"You could have told me you intended to become a Guardian instead of faking the final death."
"And have you stay around as the loyal, faithful Consort to a Queen who no longer needed one?"
Saetan refilled the glasses. "I could have been a friend. Or you could have dismissed me from your court if that's what you wanted."
"Dismiss you?
You?
You were ... are ... Saetan, the Prince of the Darkness, High Lord of Hell. No one dismisses you. Not even Witch."
Saetan stared at her. "Damn you," he said bitterly.
Cassandra wearily brushed a stray hair from her face. "It's done, Saetan. It was lifetimes ago. There's the child to think about now."
Saetan watched the fire burning in the hearth. She was entitled to her own life, and certainly wasn't responsible for his, but she didn't understand—or didn't want to understand—what that friendship might have meant to him. Even if he'd never seen her again, knowing she still existed would have eased some of the emptiness. Would he have married Hekatah if he hadn't been so desperately lonely?
Cassandra laced her fingers around her glass. "You've seen her?"
Saetan thought of his study and snorted. "Yes, I've
seen her."
I'm sure of it."
"She's going to be Witch. I'm sure of it." "Going to be?" Saetan's golden eyes narrowed. "What do you mean, 'going to be'? Are we talking about the same child? Jaenelle?"
"Of course we're talking about Jaenelle," she snapped.
"She isn't 'going to be' Witch, Cassandra. She already
is
Witch."
Cassandra shook her head vigorously. "Not possible. Witch always wear the Black Jewels."
"So does the daughter of my soul," Saetan replied too quietly.
It took her a moment to understand him. When she did she lifted the wineglass with shaking hands and drained it "H-how do you . . ."
"She showed me the Jewels she was gifted with. A full uncut set of the 'lighter' Jewels—and that was the first time I'd ever heard
anyone
refer to the Ebon-gray as a lighter Jewel—and thirteen uncut Blacks."
Cassandra's face turned gray. Saetan gently chafed her ice-cold hands, concerned by the shock in her eyes. She was the one who'd first seen the child in her tangled web. She was the one who'd told him about it. Had she only seen Witch but not understood what was coming?
Saetan put a warming spell on his cape and wrapped it around her, then warmed another glass of wine over a little tongue of witchfire. When her teeth stopped chattering, he returned to his own chair.
Her emerald eyes asked the question she couldn't put into words.
"Lorn," he said quietly. "She got the Jewels from Lorn." Cassandra shuddered. "Mother Night." She shook her head. "It's not supposed to be like this, Saetan. How will we control her?"
His hand jerked as he refilled his glass. Wine splashed on the table. "We don't control her. We don't even try." Cassandra smacked her palm on the table. "She's a child! Too young to understand that much power and not emotionally ready to accept the responsibilities that come with it. At her age, she's too open to influence."
He almost asked her whose influence she feared, but Hekatah's face popped into his mind. Pretty, charming, scheming, vicious Hekatah, who had married him because she'd thought he would make her the High Priestess of Terreille at least or, possibly, the dominant female influence in all three Realms.
When he'd refused to bend to her wishes, she'd tried on her own and had caused the war between Terreille and Kaeleer, a war that had left Terreille devastated for centuries and had been the reason why many of Kaeleer's races had closed their lands to outsiders and were never seen or heard from again.
If Hekatah got her claws into Jaenelle and molded the girl into her own greedy, ambitious image . . .
"You have to control her, Saetan," Cassandra said, watching him.
Saetan shook his head. "Even if I were willing, I don't think I could. There's a soft fog around her, a sweet, cold, black mist. I'm not sure, even young as she is, that I'd like I black to find out what lies beneath it without her invitation." Annoyed by the way Cassandra kept glaring at him, Saetan looked around the kitchen and noticed a primitive drawing tacked on the wall. "Where did you get that?"
"What? Oh, Jaenelle dropped it off a few days ago and asked me to keep it. Seems she was playing at a friend's house and didn't want to take the picture home." Cassandra tucked stray hairs back into her braid. "Saetan, you said there's a soft fog around her. There's a mist around Beldon Mor, too."
Saetan frowned at her. What did he care about some city's weather? That picture held an answer if he could just figure it out.
"A psychic mist," Cassandra said, rapping her knuckles on the table, "that keeps demons and Guardians out."
Saetan snapped to attention. "Where's Beldon Mor?"
"On Chaillot. That's an island just west of here. You can see it from the hill behind the Sanctuary. Beldon Mor is the capital. I think Jaenelle lives there. I tried to find a way into—"
Now she had his full attention. "Are you mad?" He combed his fingers through his thick black hair. "If she went to that much effort to retain her privacy, why are you trying to invade it?"
"Because of what she is," Cassandra said through clenched teeth. "I thought that would be obvious."
"Don't invade her privacy, Cassandra. Don't give her a reason to distrust you. And the reason for
that
should be obvious, too."
Minutes passed in tense silence.
Saetan's attention drifted back to the picture. A creative use of vivid colors, even if he couldn't quite figure out what it was supposed to be. How could a child capable of creating butterflies, moving a structure the size of the Hall, and constructing a psychic shield that only kept specific kinds of beings out be so hopeless at basic Craft?
"It's clumsy," Saetan whispered as his eyes widened.
Cassandra looked up wearily. "She's a child, Saetan. You can't expect her to have the training or the motor control—"
She squeaked when he grabbed her arm. "But that's just it! For Jaenelle, doing things that require tremendous expenditures of psychic energy is like giving her a large piece of paper and color-sticks she can wrap her fist around. Small things, the basic things we usually start with because they don't require a lot of strength, are like asking her to use a single-haired brush. She doesn't have the physical or mental control yet to do them." He sprawled in the chair, exultant.
"Wonderful," Cassandra said sarcastically. "So she can't move furniture around a room, but she can destroy an entire continent."
"She'll never do that. It's not in her temperament."
"How can you be sure? How will you control her?"
They were back to that.
He took his cape back and settled it over his shoulders. "I'm not going to control her, Cassandra. She's Witch. No male has the right to control Witch."
Cassandra studied him. "Then what are you going to do?"
Saetan picked up his cane. "Love her. That will have to be enough."
"And if it's not?"
"It will have to be." He paused at the kitchen door. "May I see you from time to time?"
Her smile didn't quite reach her eyes. "Friends do."
He left the Sanctuary feeling exhilarated and bruised. He'd loved Cassandra dearly once, but he had no right to ask anything of her except what Protocol dictated a Warlord Prince could ask of a Queen.
Besides, Cassandra was his past. Jaenelle, may the Darkness help him, was his future.
2 / Hell
Dropping from the Black Wind, Saetan appeared in an outer courtyard that held one of the Keep's official landing webs, which was etched in the stone with a clear Jewel at its center. The clear Jewels acted as beacons for those who rode the Winds—a kind of welcoming candle in the window—and every landing web had a piece of one. It was the only use that had ever been found for them. Leaning heavily on his cane, Saetan limped across the empty courtyard to the huge, open-metal doors embedded into the mountain itself, rang the bell, and waited to enter the Keep, the Black Mountain, Ebon Askavi, where the Winds meet. It was the repository for the Blood's history as well as a sanctuary for the darkest-Jeweled Blood. It was also the private lair of Witch.
The doors opened silently. Geoffrey, the Keep's historian/librarian, waited for him on the other side.
"High Lord." Geoffrey bowed slightly in greeting.
Saetan returned the bow. "Geoffrey."
"It's been a while since you've visited the Keep. Your absence has been noted."
Saetan snorted softly, his lips curving into a faint, dry smile. "In other words, I haven't been useful lately."
"In other words," Geoffrey agreed, smiling. As he walked beside Saetan, his black eyes glanced once at the cane. "So you're here."
"I need your help." Saetan looked at the Guardian's pale face, a stark, unsettling white when combined with the black eyes, feathery black eyebrows, black hair with a pronounced widow's peak, the black tunic and trousers, and the most sensuous blood-red lips Saetan had ever seen on anyone, man or woman. Geoffrey was the last of his race, a race gone to dust so long ago that no one remembered who they were. He was ancient when Saetan first came to the Keep as Cassandra's Consort. Then, as now, he was the Keep's historian and librarian. "I need to look up some of the ancient legends."
"Lorn, for example?"
Saetan jerked to a stop.
Geoffrey turned, his black eyes carefully neutral.
"You've seen her," Saetan said, a hint of jealousy in his voice.
"We've seen her."
"Draca, too?" Saetan's chest tightened at the thought of Jaenelle confronting the Keep's Seneschal.