1 / Kaeleer

Saetan steepled his fingers and stared at Sylvia. “I beg your pardon?”

“You have to talk to Tersa,” Sylvia said again.

Damn her. Why was she being so insistent?

With difficulty, he leashed his temper. It wasn’t Sylvia’s fault. She had no way of knowing how he and Tersa were connected.

“Would you like some wine?” he finally asked, his deep voice betraying too much of his heart.

Sylvia eyed the decanter on the corner of his desk. “If that’s brandy, why don’t you pour yourself a glass and hand me the decanter.”

Saetan filled two brandy snifters and floated one to her.

Sylvia took a generous swallow and choked a little.

“That’s not exactly the way to drink good brandy,” he said dryly, but he slugged back a good portion of his own glass, despite the headache he knew it would give him. “All right. Tell me about Tersa.”

Sylvia leaned forward, her arms braced on the chair, both hands cupped around the snifter. “I’m not a child, Saetan. I understand that some people slip into the Twisted Kingdom and some people are shoved—and a very brave few make a deliberate choice. And I know most Black Widows who become lost in the Twisted Kingdom aren’t harmful to others. In their own way, they’re extraordinarily wise.”

“But?”

Sylvia pressed her lips together. “Mikal, my youngest son, spends quite a bit of time with her. He thinks she’s wonderful.” She finished the brandy and held out her glass for a refill. “Lately she’s been calling him Daemon.”

Her voice was so low, so husky he had to strain to hear her. He wished, bitterly, that he hadn’t heard.

“Mikal shrugs it off,” Sylvia continued after taking another large swallow of brandy. “He says anyone stuffed that full of interesting things to say could easily get confused about everyday things, and she’d probably known a boy named Daemon and used to tell him the same kind of interesting stuff.”

She never got the chance. He was already lost, to both of us, by the time he was Mikal’s age. “But?”

“The last couple of times Mikal’s gone to see her, she keeps telling him to be careful.” Sylvia closed her eyes and frowned in concentration. “She says the bridge is very fragile, and she’ll keep sending the sticks.” She opened her eyes and poured herself another brandy. “Sometimes she just holds Mikal and cries. She keeps sticks she’s collected from every yard in the village in a big basket in her kitchen and panics if anyone goes near them. But she can’t, or won’t, tell Mikal or me why the sticks are important. I’ve had every bridge around Halaway checked and they’re all sound, even the smallest footbridge. I thought maybe she’d tell you.”

Would she tell him? Would she let him broach the one subject she refused to discuss with him? When he went to see her, one hour each week, Tersa talked about her garden; she told him what she’d had for dinner; she showed him a piece of needlepoint she was working on; she talked about Jaenelle. But she wouldn’t talk about their son.

“I’ll try,” he said quietly.

Sylvia put her empty glass on the desk and stood up, swaying.

Saetan went around the desk, cupped his hand under her elbow, and led her to the door. “You should go home and take a nap.”

“I never take naps.”

“After that much brandy, I doubt you’ll have a choice.”

“My metabolism will burn it up fast enough.” Sylvia hiccuped.

“Uh-huh. Did you realize you called me Saetan?”

She turned so fast she fell against him. He liked the feel of her. It disturbed him that he liked the feel of her.

“I’m sorry, High Lord. I’m sorry.”

“Are you?” he asked softly. “I’m not sure I am.”

Sylvia stared at him. She hesitated. She said nothing.

He let her go.

“You’re going out?”

Jaenelle leaned against the wall opposite his bedroom door, her finger tucked between the pages of a Craft book to hold her place.

Amused, Saetan raised an eyebrow. It was usually the parent who insisted on knowing his offspring’s whereabouts, not the other way around. “I’m going to see Tersa.”

“Why? This isn’t your usual evening to see her.”

He caught the slight edge in her voice, the subtle warning. “Am I that predictable?” he asked, smiling.

Jaenelle didn’t smile back.

Before her own catastrophic plunge into the abyss or wherever she’d spent those two years, Jaenelle had gone into the Twisted Kingdom and had led Tersa back to the blurred boundary that separated madness and sanity. That was as far as Tersa could go—or was willing to go.

Jaenelle had helped her regain a little of the real world. Now that they were living near each other, Jaenelle continued to help Tersa fill in the pieces that made up the physical world. Small things. Simple things. Trees and flowers. The feel of loam between strong fingers. The pleasure of a bowl of soup and a thick slice of fresh-baked bread.

“Sylvia came to see me this afternoon,” he said slowly, trying to understand the chill emanating from Jaenelle. “She thinks Tersa’s upset about something, so I wanted to look in on her.”

Jaenelle’s sapphire eyes were as deep and still as a bottomless lake. “Don’t push where you’re not welcome, High Lord,” Witch said.

He wondered if she knew how much her eyes revealed. “You’d prefer I not see her?” he asked respectfully.

Her eyes changed. “See her if you like,” his daughter replied. “But don’t invade her privacy.”

“There’s no wine.” Tersa opened and closed cupboards, looking more and more confused. “The woman didn’t buy the wine. She always buys a bottle of wine on fourth-day so it will be here for you. She didn’t buy the wine, and tomorrow I was going to draw a picture of my garden and show it to you, but third-day’s gone and I don’t know where I put it.”

Saetan sat at the pine kitchen table, his body saturated with sorrow until it felt too heavy to move. He’d joked about being predictable. He hadn’t realized that his predictability was one of Tersa’s touchstones, a means by which she separated the days. Jaenelle had known and had let him come to learn the lesson for himself.

With his hands braced on the table, he pushed himself up from the chair. Every movement was an effort, but he reached Tersa, who was still opening cupboards and muttering, seated her at the table, put a kettle on the stove, and, after a little exploring in the cupboards, made them both a cup of chamomile tea.

As he put the cup in front of her, he brushed the tangled black hair away from her face. He couldn’t remember a time when Tersa’s hair didn’t look as if she’d washed it and let it dry in the wind, as if her fingers were the only comb it had ever known. He suspected it wasn’t madness but intensity that made her indifferent. And he wondered if that wasn’t one of the reasons, when he’d finally agreed to that contract with the Hayllian Hourglass to sire a child, that he’d chosen Tersa, who was already broken, already teetering on the edge of madness. He’d spent over an hour brushing her hair that first night. He’d brushed her hair every night of the week he’d bedded her, enjoying the feel of it between his fingers, the gentle pull of the brush.

Now, sitting across from her, his hands around the mug, he said, “I came early, Tersa. You didn’t lose third-day. This is second-day.”

Tersa frowned. “Second-day? You don’t come on second-day.”

“I wanted to talk to you. I didn’t want to wait until fourth-day. I’ll come back on fourth-day to see your drawing.”

Some of the confusion left her gold eyes. She sipped her tea.

The pine table was empty except for a small azure vase holding three red roses.

Tersa gently touched the petals. “The boy picked these for me.”

“Which boy is that?” Saetan said quietly.

“Mikal. Sylvia’s boy. He comes to visit. Did she tell you?”

“I thought you might mean Daemon.”

Tersa snorted. “Daemon’s not a boy now. Besides, he’s far away.” Her eyes became clouded, farseeing. “And the island has no flowers.”

“But you call Mikal Daemon.”

Tersa shrugged. “Sometimes it’s nice to pretend that I’m telling him stories. Jaenelle says it’s all right to pretend.”

A cold finger whispered down his spine. “You’ve told Jaenelle about Daemon?”

“Of course not,” Tersa said irritably. “She’s not ready to know about him. All the threads are not yet in place.”

“What threads—”

“The lover is the father’s mirror. The brother stands between. The mirror spins, spins, spins. Blood. So much blood. He clings to the island of maybe. The bridge will have to rise from the sea. The threads are not yet in place.”

“Tersa, where is Daemon?”

Tersa blinked, drew a shuddering breath. She stared at him, frowning. “The boy’s name is Mikal.”

He wanted to shout at her, Where’s my son? Why hasn’t he gone to the Keep or come through one of the Gates? What’s he waiting for? Useless to shout at her. She couldn’t translate what she’d seen any better than she had. One thing he did understand. All the threads were not yet in place. Until they were, all he could do was wait.

“What are the sticks for, Tersa?”

“Sticks?” Tersa looked at the basket of sticks in the corner of the kitchen. “They have no purpose.” She shrugged. “Kindling?”

She withdrew from him, exhausted by the effort of keeping the stones of reality and madness from grinding her soul.

“Is there anything I can do for you?” he asked, preparing to leave.

Tersa hesitated. “It would anger you.”

Right now, he didn’t feel capable of that strong an emotion. “It won’t anger me. I promise.”

“Would you…Would you hold me for a minute?”

It rocked him. He, who had always craved physical affection, had never thought to offer her an embrace.

He closed his arms around her. She wrapped her arms around his back and rested her head on his shoulder.

“I don’t miss the rutting, but it feels good to be held by a man.”

Saetan gently kissed her tangled hair. “Why didn’t you mention it before? I didn’t know you wanted to be held.”

“Now you do.”

2 / Kaeleer

The Dark Council whispered.

At first it was only a thoughtful look, a troubled frown. The High Lord had done many things in his long life—look what he’d done to the Council itself in order to become the girl’s guardian—but it was hard to believe he was capable of that. He had always insisted that the strength of a Territory, the strength of the Realm, depended on the strength of its witches, especially its Queens. To think he would do such things with a vulnerable girl, a dark young Queen…

Oh, yes, they had inquired about the girl before now, but the High Lord had always responded tersely. The girl was ill. She could have no visitors. She was being privately tutored.

Where had the girl been during the past two years? What had she been subjected to? Was Jorval sure?

No, Lord Jorval insisted, he was not sure. It was only a spurious rumor made by a dismissed servant. There was no reason to suspect it wasn’t just as the High Lord had said. The girl probably was ill, an invalid of some kind, perhaps too emotionally or physically fragile for the stimulation of visitors.

The High Lord had made no mention of the girl being ill until the Council requested to see her the first time.

Jorval stroked his dark beard with a thin hand and shook his head. There was no evidence. Only the word of a man who couldn’t be found.

Murmurs, speculations, whisssspers.

3 / The Twisted Kingdom

He clung to the sharp grass on the crumbling island of maybe and watched the sticks float toward him. They were evenly spaced like the boards of a rope bridge strung across the endless sea. But the footing would be precarious at best, and there were no ropes to hang on to. If he tried to use them, he would sink beneath the vast sea of blood.

He was going to sink anyway. The island continued to crumble. Eventually there wouldn’t be enough left to hold him.

He was tired. He was willing to let it suck him down.

The sticks broke formation, swirled and re-formed, swirled and re-formed over and over again into rough letters.

You are my instrument.

Words lie. Blood doesn’t.

Butchering whore.

He tried to scramble away from that side of the island, but the other side kept crumbling, crumbling. There was only enough room now for him to lie there, helpless.

Something moved beneath the sea of blood, disturbing the sticks and their endless words. The sticks swirled around his small island, bumped against the crumbling edges of maybe, and piled up against each other to form a fragile, protective wall.

He leaned over the edge and watched the face float upward, sapphire eyes staring at nothing, golden hair spread out like a fan.

The lips moved. Daemon.

He reached down and gently lifted the face out of the sea of blood. Not a head, just a face, as smooth and lifeless as a mask.

The lips moved again. The word sounded like the sigh of the night wind, like a caress. Daemon.

The face dissolved, oozed through his fingers.

Sobbing, he tried to hold it, tried to re-form it into that beloved face. The harder he tried, the quicker it slipped through his fingers until there was nothing left.

Shadows in the bloody sea. A woman’s face, full of compassion and understanding, surrounded by a mass of tangled black hair.

Wait, she said. Wait. The threads are not yet in place.

She vanished in the ripples.

Finally, there was an easy thing to do, a thing without pain, without fear.

Making himself as comfortable as possible, he settled down to wait.

4 / Kaeleer

Saetan wondered if there was something wrong with the bookcases behind his desk or if there was something wrong with his butler, because Beale had been staring at the same spot for almost a minute.

“High Lord,” Beale said stiffly, still staring at the bookcases.

“Beale,” Saetan replied cautiously.

“There’s a Warlord to see you.”

Saetan carefully set his glasses on top of the papers covering his desk, and folded his hands to keep them from shaking. “Is he cringing?”

Beale’s lips twitched. “No, High Lord.”

Saetan sagged in his chair. “Thank the Darkness. At least he’s not here because of something the girls have done.”

“I don’t believe the Ladies are involved, High Lord.”

“Then send him in.”

The Warlord who entered the study was a head taller than Saetan, twice as wide, and solid muscle. His hands were big enough to engulf a man’s skull and strong enough to crush one. He looked like a rough man who would wrench what he wanted from the land or from other people. But beneath that massive body and roaring voice was a heart filled with simple joy and a soul too sensitive to bear harsh treatment.

He was Dujae. Five hundred years ago, he had been the finest artist in Kaeleer. Now he was a demon.

Saetan knew it was hypocritical to be angry with Dujae for coming here since Mephis, Andulvar, and Prothvar were all frequently in residence at the Hall since Jaenelle had returned with him, and they all had contact with the children. Even so, keeping the Dark Realm separated from the living Realms had always been a knife-edged dance, and he was uncomfortably aware that, even when living, he’d straddled that line. Now with all the children spending the summer at the Hall and the Dark Council pressuring him for an interview with Jaenelle, having demons coming into Kaeleer for an audience with him was beyond tolerance.

“Twice a month I hold an audience in Hell for any who wish to come before me,” he said coldly. “You’ve no business here, Lord Dujae.”

Dujae stared at the floor, his long, thick fingers pulling at the brim of the shabby blue cap he held in his hands. “I know, High Lord. Forgive me. I should not have come here, but I could not wait.”

Saetan could, and did.

Dujae crushed the cap in his hands. When he finally looked up, there was only despair in his eyes. “I am so tired, High Lord. There is nothing left to paint, no one to teach, to share with. No purpose, no joy. There is nothing. Please, High Lord.”

Saetan closed his eyes, his anger forgotten. It happened sometimes. Hell was a cold, cruel, blasted Realm, but it had its measure of kindness. It was a place where the Blood could make peace with their lives, a suspended time to take care of unfinished business. Some did nothing with that last gift, enduring weeks or years or centuries of tedium before finally fading into the Darkness. Others embraced that time to nurture talents they’d ignored while living or chosen to forsake in order to follow another road. Others, cut off before they were finished, continued as they had lived. Dujae had died in his prime, suddenly, unexpectedly. When he realized he could still paint, he had accepted being demon-dead with a joyous heart.

Now he was asking Saetan to release him from the dead flesh, to consume the last of his psychic strength and let him become a whisper in the Darkness.

It happened sometimes. Not often, thankfully, but sometimes the desire to continue faded before the psychic strength. When that happened, a demon came to him and asked for a swift release. And because he was the High Lord, he honored those requests.

Saetan opened his eyes and blinked hard to clear his vision. “Dujae, are you sure?”

“I’m—”

Karla exploded into the room. “That overbearing, overdressed, over-scented sewer rat says my drawing is deficient!” Her eyes filled with tears as she flung a sketch pad onto Saetan’s desk.

He vanished his glasses before the sketch pad landed on them.

“He’s a grubby-minded prick,” Karla wailed. “This isn’t my life’s work, this isn’t my road. This is supposed to be fun!”

Saetan surged out of his chair. There had been so many tutors coming and going in the past three weeks he couldn’t remember this particular ass’s name, but if the man could reduce Karla to tears, he was probably shredding Kalush and Morghann, to say nothing of Jaenelle.

Dujae reached for the sketch pad.

“No!” Karla dove for the pad, too upset to remember she could vanish it before Dujae’s hand closed around it.

Her forehead hit Dujae’s arm. She stumbled backward into Saetan. He wrapped his arms around her and ground his teeth, hating the anguish pouring out of her.

Dujae studied the sketch. He shook his head slowly. “This is terrible,” he rumbled, flipping the pages back to earlier sketches. “Obscene,” he roared. He shook the sketch pad at Karla. “You call him sewer rat? You are too kind, Lady. He’s a—”

“Dujae,” Saetan warned, first to prevent Dujae from possibly teaching Karla a pithy phrase she didn’t already know and second because he’d felt Karla perk up.

Dujae looked at Saetan and took a deep breath. “He is not a good instructor,” he finished lamely.

Karla sniffed. “You don’t think my drawings are good either.”

Dujae flipped to the last sketch. “What is this?” he demanded, stabbing the paper with his finger.

Karla pulled her shoulders back and narrowed her eyes.

Saetan stifled a groan and held on tighter.

“It’s a vase,” she said coolly.

“Vase. Bah!” Dujae ripped the page from the pad, crumpled it, and threw it over his shoulder. He pointed at Karla.

Did Dujae realize just how close his finger was to Karla’s teeth?

“You are a Queen, yes?” Dujae continued to roar. “You do this for fun when you are finished with the hard lessons of your Craft, yes? You do this because Ladies must learn many things to be good Queens, yes? You do not make polite, itsy-bitsy drawings.” He scrunched up his shoulders, scrunched up his face, tucked his wrist under his chin, and made tiny scratching motions. “Bah!” He pulled Karla out of Saetan’s arms, spun her around, engulfed her hand in his own, and began making large, circular motions. “There is fire in your heart, yes? That fire needs charcoal and a large pad to express itself. Then when you want to draw a vase, you draw a vase.”

“B-but—” Karla stammered, watching her hand sweep round and round.

“That vase you try to draw, that is someone else’s vase. Use it as a model. Models are good. Then you draw YOUR VASE, the one that reveals the fire, the one that says I am a witch, I am a Queen, I am—” Dujae finally hesitated.

“Karla,” she said meekly.

“KARLA!” Dujae roared.

“What’s going on?” Jaenelle asked from the doorway. Gabrielle stood beside her.

Saetan settled on the corner of his desk and crossed his arms, resigned to whatever the little darlings were about to do.

Seeing the other girls, Dujae released Karla and stepped back.

“Do we have any charcoal?” Karla asked, wiping her eyes.

“We have some, but Lord Stuffy says charcoal is messy and not the proper medium for Ladies,” Gabrielle said tartly.

Saetan stared at Gabrielle and wondered what sort of idiot he’d hired as an art instructor.

Then he felt the blood rush out of his head. He gripped the desk, willing himself not to faint. He’d never fainted. This would be a very bad time to start.

With the other girls around them, he hadn’t recognized the triangle of power. Karla, Gabrielle, Jaenelle. Three strong Queens who were also natural Black Widows.

May the Darkness be merciful, he thought. That trio could tear apart anything or anyone—or build anything they wanted.

“High Lord?”

Saetan blinked. He took a deep breath. His lungs still worked, sort of. Finally sure he wasn’t going to keel over, he looked around. Dujae was the only one left in the room.

Dujae twisted his cap. “I did not mean to interfere.”

“Too late now,” Saetan muttered.

Three blond heads appeared at the study door.

“Hey,” Karla said. “We’ve got the charcoal and large sketch pads. Aren’t you coming?”

Dujae continued to twist his cap. “I cannot, Ladies.”

“Why not?” Jaenelle asked as the three of them entered the study.

Dujae looked beseechingly at Saetan, who refused to look at anything but the point of his shoe.

“I—I am Dujae, Lady.”

Jaenelle looked pleased. “You painted Descent into Hell.”

Dujae’s eyes widened.

“Why can’t you give us drawing lessons?” Gabrielle said.

“I am a demon.”

Silence.

Karla cocked a hip and crossed her arms. “What, there’s some rule that says drawing has to be taught in the daytime? Besides, the sun’s up now and you’re here.”

“That’s because the Hall retains enough dark power so that sunlight doesn’t bother the demon-dead when they’re inside,” Jaenelle said.

“So that’s not a problem,” Karla said.

“And if you don’t want to be here during the daylight hours, candle-lights or balls of witchlight would make a room bright enough to work in,” Gabrielle said.

Dujae looked helplessly at Saetan. Saetan studied his other shoe.

“Is your ego so puffed up that it’s beneath you to teach a few little witches how to draw?” Karla asked with sweet malevolence.

“Puffed up? No, no, Ladies, I would be honored but—”

“But?” Jaenelle asked softly in her midnight voice.

Dujae shuddered. Saetan shivered.

“I am a demon.”

Silence.

Finally Karla snorted. “If you don’t want to teach us, just say so, but stop using a paltry excuse to weasel out of it.”

They left, closing the study door behind them.

Dujae twisted his cap.

Saetan stared at his shoe. “Dujae,” he said quietly, “it takes a strong but sensitive personality to deal with these young Ladies, not to mention talent. If you decide to become their art instructor, I can either provide you with wages which, I admit, aren’t much use in the Dark Realm, or you can add whatever you want for your own projects to the list of supplies you’ll provide me for them. However, if you decide to decline”—he looked Dujae in the eye—“you can go out there and try to explain it to them.”

There was panic in Dujae’s eyes. There was also only one door out of the study.

“But, High Lord, I am a demon.”

“Didn’t impress them, did it?”

Dujae sagged. “No.” Then he shrugged and smiled. “It has been a long time since I have done portraits, and they have interesting faces, yes? And too much fire to be wasted on polite, itsy-bitsy drawings.”

Saetan waited half an hour before strolling into the great hall. Staying well in the background, he watched the coven.

The girls were sitting on the floor in a circle, busily sketching a still life of vase, apple, and trinket box. Dujae squatted next to Kalush, explaining something in a rumbling murmur before turning to Morghann, who had a stick of charcoal poised above her sketch pad.

Jaenelle put down her pad, wiped her fingers on the towel she was sharing with Karla, and approached him, smiling, nothing more than a delightful, delighted woman-child enjoying a creative endeavor.

Saetan slipped an arm around her waist. “The truth, witch-child,” he said quietly. “Was the other one really a bad instructor?”

Jaenelle ran her finger down the gold chain that held his Birthright Red Jewel. “He wasn’t right for us, any of us, and—”

He wouldn’t let her duck her head, wouldn’t let her hide the eyes he was learning to read so well, that told him so much. “And?”

“He was afraid of me,” she whispered. “Not just me,” she quickly amended. “He didn’t like being around Queens. Even Kalush made him uneasy. So he was always saying things like ‘ladies’ do this and ‘ladies’ don’t do that. Hell’s fire, Saetan, we aren’t ‘ladies,’ we don’t want to be ‘ladies.’ We’re witches.”

He wrapped his arms around her. “Why didn’t you tell me?” He seemed to be asking that a lot lately.

Jaenelle shrugged. “We hadn’t gotten around to telling you that the music instructor and the dancing instructor already bolted this week.”

Saetan let out a chuckling sigh. “Well, lessons and summertime are probably a bad combination anyway.” He kissed her hair. “Dujae came here because he wanted to be released.”

“Not really. He just needed something to spark his interest again.”

Saetan watched Dujae move around the circle, gesturing, rumbling encouragement, frowning as he studied Karla’s sketch before saying something that made her laugh. There was no despair in Dujae’s eyes now, no hint of the pain that had driven him to seek out the High Lord.

“We aren’t puppet masters, witch-child,” Saetan murmured. “We’re very powerful, but we must be careful about pulling strings to make other people dance.”

“Depends on why the strings are being pulled, don’t you think?” She looked at him with those ancient sapphire eyes and smiled. “Besides, we just overrode a silly excuse. If it was his time, he would have gone.”

She returned to her spot on the floor, Karla on her right, Gabrielle on her left.

He returned to his study and warmed a glass of yarbarah.

Puppet masters. Manipulators. Hekatah and her schemes. Jaenelle and her sensitivity to other hearts. Such a fine, fragile line, with intent the only difference.

He picked up the latest letter from the Dark Council. There was something beneath the terse words that disturbed him, but it was too vague for him to define. He couldn’t put them off much longer. A few more weeks at most. What then?

Such a fine, fragile line.

What then?

5 / Kaeleer

Jaenelle picked up a small vial and tapped three amethyst-colored granules into the large glass bowl on the worktable. “Why are members of the Dark Council coming here?”

Saetan eyed the thick, bubbling liquid that covered the bottom third of the bowl and sincerely hoped the stuff wasn’t a new tonic. “Since my legal guardianship was granted by the Council, they want to look in on us to see how we live.”

“If they’re members of the Council, they’re also Jeweled Blood. They should know how we live.” Jaenelle picked up a vial of red powder and held it up to the light.

Saetan crossed his arms and leaned against the wall. He wouldn’t, couldn’t tell her about the latest “request” from the Council. Their strident insistence had made it easy to read between the lines. They weren’t just coming to look in on a guardian and his ward. They were coming to pass judgment on him.

“I’m not going to have to wear a dress, am I?” Jaenelle growled as she dipped her little finger into the vial of red powder. Using her nail as a scoop, she tapped the powder into the bowl.

Saetan bit his tongue before the lie could slip out. “No. They said they wanted to see a normal afternoon.”

Jaenelle looked at him over her shoulder. “Have we ever had a normal afternoon?”

“No,” Saetan said mournfully. “We have typical afternoons, but I don’t think anyone would consider them normal.”

Her silvery, velvet-coated laugh filled the room. “Poor Papa. Well, since I don’t have to dress up and simper, I’ll try not to offend their delicate sensibilities.” She handed him a vial of black powder. “Put a pinch of that in the bowl and stand back.”

The butterflies in his stomach were having a grand time. “What happens then?”

Jaenelle laced her fingers. “Well, if I mixed the powders in the right proportions to the spell, it’ll create an impressive illusion.”

Saetan looked from his nervously smiling daughter to the bowl on the table to the vial in his hand. “And if you didn’t mix them in the right proportions?”

“It’ll blow up the table.”

An hour later, as he lay in a deep, hot bath, soaking the soreness out of his muscles, he had to give her full marks for her fast reflexes and the strength of her protective shields. Except for knocking them both to the floor, the explosion hadn’t damaged anything in the room—except the glass bowl and the table. And he had to admit that the shape that had started rising out of the bowl had been impressive.

Two days from now, the Dark Council would come to the Hall. He would show them courtesy and endure their presence because, in the end, it didn’t matter what they thought. No one was going to take her away from him. If the Council had to learn that lesson twice, so be it.

He doubted it would come to that. Remembering the awe-filled moment between the shape starting to rise from the mist and the table exploding, he let out a moan that turned into a chuckle. The Dark Council wanted to spend a typical afternoon with Jaenelle?

The poor fools would never survive it.