She threw her hand out reflexively as Balffe propelled her to the top of the stairs outside the great hall. It was so brilliantly light outside, and so densely dark inside, she was blinded for a moment. Balffe dropped down the stairs into the hall, herding her before him.

Rardove sat in his chair on the dais, wrapped in a cape that grew his shoulders out like a crow’s wings, watching their approach. His cold features—nose, chin, cheek—were set in a pinched, translucent mold. Whatever had been golden about his presence before was now tarnished. Only his eyes revealed life.

He rose from his seat like a bird taking flight. Senna wanted to fling herself at him, scratching and clawing. Or, preferably, throw a knife into him. Instead, she forced herself to stumble. Appear weak.

Balffe bent to her, hand extended, but a sharp glance from the baron drew him upright again.

It was utterly silent. Silence seeped from the walls, a wicked, waiting thing. No one spoke. The clatter of a dropped mug brought a clumsy maid to tears. The baron’s furious gaze fell on her, which only made things worse. It took two varlets and a strong tincture to get her huddled, weeping figure out of the middle of the hall floor.

The hall was almost empty now. Only Senna, Balffe, and Rardove. And Pentony. She sensed him there, in the shadows.

“Sir,” Balffe said, stepping forward. He pushed Senna out in front of him. “As ordered.”

Rardove’s gaze slid over her, from head to dirty yellow skirt hem. “Where?”

“Near The O’Fáil encampment, by the old barrows hill. No escort. She’d escaped, or left, or something. She won’t say.”

Rardove looked her over, his eyes glittering. “Certainly she will,” he murmured, coming around the table and down the dais stairs.

She stared at the far wall, where a faded, limp tapestry hung behind the dais.

“So much trouble, over one small woman,” Rardove mused, striding around her. Suddenly, his breath was on the back of her neck, sliding over her like smoke. His hand slid up under her skirts, up her thigh. She shuddered, but his fingers found the blade she’d lodged in a band there. He slipped it free and stepped back.

“I do not know why you came back, Senna—or were sent back—but I will learn. And you shall not like my methods.”

She stopped breathing.

Balffe cleared his throat. Rardove’s eyes darted from Senna’s determined profile, still angled toward the wall behind the dais, to his captain, who obviously had more news to relay. “What is it?”

“They attempted a capture. Just outside your gates.”

“Did they?”

“Aye. The Irishry. And her brother.”

Rardove twitched slightly. “De Valery?”

“Aye. With O’Melaghlin.”

Rardove contemplated this a moment, then swung out his arm. “So be it. De Valery has made his choice. He shall die with the rest of them.”

Senna swallowed thickly, her jaw set.

Rardove nodded to Balffe. “Ready the men. The plain is fat with villagers and their whelp. Gather every male over twelve and put him on the castle walls. Siege measures to be enacted, in the event. Send a messenger to the sortie we sent to intercept Wogan. Tell them to shoot de Valery on sight, should he try to establish communication with Wogan. Come dawn, the rest of the troops will arrive, and we shall be ready for battle.” He looked down at Senna. “By then, who knows what my dye-witch will have done for me?”

No one moved. Balffe glanced at Senna. He shifted uncomfortably.

Rardove turned slowly. “Balffe?”

The soldier’s gaze snapped from Senna.

“Why are you still standing there like a dolt? Round up the men.”

Senna saw a telltale flicker shudder cross the veteran warrior’s face. It was nothing of note, a flash by his lips, a tightening along his jaw. He turned to his men-at-arms, who were lined up along the walls.

“You heard what your lord said. Double the watches, everyone on half rations. Mac and Conally, round up the men from the rabble out front.”

A slow groan rose from the war-wasted men, some of whom were only here on castle duty from their own lords, a service that was due to end for some of them within a dawn.

At the sound, Balffe turned back with a blank and utterly terrifying look. “You want for me to convince you?”

The men scattered. Wood-soled boots cracked stone as they barreled up the stairs out of the hall. Angry echoes bounced back into the hall as the soldiers passed along the long, dank corridors to the barracks.

Rardove turned to Senna. “And now, what shall I do with you?” he said, his tone contemplative.

“Do with me, my lord?” The interchange with Balffe had given her just enough time to gather her wits, and she needed them all to carry her next words into the air. “Why, you shall marry me.”

Rardove’s attention narrowed in on her like an archer’s. “I somehow doubt you will say ‘I will’ in front of a priest.”

“I somehow doubt you would have a priest who much cared. But I shall come willing enough.”

“You will?”

“Aye.”

Rardove’s hand shot out and gripped her shoulder. The pain had begun. “Willing? You lie,” he spat. “That is as big a lie as the other.”

Cold drops of fear slid down the back of her throat like medicine. “Aye, I lied. But we both knew that, did we not? I am a dyer. As skilled as my mother was.”

“You are like her in every manner,” he snarled, then reached into his tunic and slammed something into her chest. She toppled backward a few steps, gripping what he pressed there.

The missing pages. He’d found them.

Indeed, she found herself thinking—some rational, orderly part of her mind was still in working order—no more concerns on how to proceed. We know just what to do.

She pushed back her shoulders and said in a clear voice, “I will make you the dyes.”

He burst out laughing. “I know exactly what you will do, Senna. When, and how.”

“Do you?” She met his gaze. “Tell me, do you want them explosive or”—she paused for effect—“camouflaging?”

His face underwent a series of small metamorphoses, from startled, to impressed, to furious, to…desirous. She seized the moment.

“You call off this war, and I will make you the dyes.”

His breathing, made unsteady by her admission, slowed. “I cannot. It has gone out of my hands.”

“Retrieve it back into them,” she said coldly. “Tell the king the dyes are only legend. A lie.” She looked down at the pages in her hand. His tongue flicked over his lips as she smoothed them. She perused them briefly before looking up. “I do not want King Edward to know of this. Do you?”

His eyes were slightly distant as they met hers. He looked in the beginning throes of madness. Or passion.

“I do not want anyone to know,” he agreed hoarsely.

She lowered her voice to match his. “No. ’Twill be our little secret. Tell Wogan, the governor. Send word to King Edward.” She looked down at the manual languidly, ran one finger slowly over it. “Call them off, and I’ll stay here with you. Willingly.”

His eyes narrowed. “Why?” He might be pure evil, but he was pure cunning evil. Incipient madness—or lust—had been overtaken by scheming. “You do not want me to have the dyes.”

She had to find a way to bind him to her more than Edward. More than his hatred. She took another intuitive step in the dark.

“This is what we do, the women in my family, is it not?” she murmured. “We start as de Valerys, but we end with you. I know my mother was here, with you.” She took a step closer. Desire swept over his face, slackening his jaw. He nodded as if in a trance. “And now, ’tis I.”

“You are mine,” he said thickly. He shoved his hand through her hair, dragging her head back. “Your mother is dead.”

“I know.” She fought off the urge to mark him, to carve up his face. Ten years ago it had gone like this, and she hadn’t known how to defend herself. The knife on the marriage bedstead had been a stroke of luck. Now, she knew very well how to defend herself. And she couldn’t do it.

If she killed Rardove, if news went out that he was dead, King Edward’s men would crawl over the castle like fleas on a straw tick, and they would find the pages. They would find her. And they would find someone who, given time, could decipher the deadly recipe of the Wishmés. Then Ireland would fall, Scotland would fall, and Finian would have ropes tied about his wrists and ankles.

Rardove’s vile lips were by her ear, breathing into her hair. “And I swear, Senna, I will kill you, too, if you do not craft the Wishmé dyes for me.”

She gathered every scrap of reason and sense from the cold, trembling corner of her petrified mind, and drew herself up. “I will work on the dyes this night,” she said, putting a hand on his chest. “In the morning, come to me.”

In the morning, she would kill him.

Or he would kill her.

But really, it couldn’t go on like this.

Twilight poured through the high, narrow windows of the empty great hall, creating a mingling of firelight and pale purple light, illuminating the spinning, dancing dust motes into an unearthly glow. Blue-black. Much like the Wishmés.

Pentony should know. He’d seen the color they made. And not the sample that was hundreds of years old. He’d watched a fresh batch be born, hatched by Senna’s mother.

Sooth, he’d helped pound out mollusk shells himself, when the baron was out hunting one afternoon and Pentony had not yet fully adapted to the groaning silences of Rardove Keep.

Elisabeth de Valery had been like fresh air when she arrived, twenty years ago. She’d chatted and laughed in that winsome, unique dialect of hers, some melding of Scots and mid-England French—and her hair practically glowed red, and she’d cared not a whit for Rardove’s rage or the gloomy Irish winters, which is probably why, when she’d handed him a mortar that dreary afternoon, Pentony simply took it and started pounding.

It is probably also why, when it became needful, a year later, he helped her escape.

And it is certainly why, when she entrusted him with the last copy of the dye manual, he did as she bid.

He’d sent it, along with a small sample of the dyed fabric, to her husband, de Valery. ‘He’ll either receive me or the secrets,’ she’d said to him, smiling. Pentony knew which he would have chosen.

Then, the night she fled, she handed him a clutch of parchment sheets, scribbled over with her mad, beautiful sketches. For my daughter, on her wedding day. Just in case, she’d whispered, and this time her smiles were covered in tears.

Then she slipped out the gates and ran for her life.

Ten years later, Pentony had followed up on that final request. He had sent the parchment sheets to her daughter. Under cover of darkness and packaged to appear a gift from an ‘unknown’ Scottish grandfather, on her betrothal eve, Senna de Valery, at fifteen, became the possessor of the last secret of the Wishmés. The only person who could create the beautiful weapons.

Right now, Pentony knew two things with absolute certainty: Rardove would never call off this war—probably couldn’t now—and Senna was a dead woman.

Just like her mother.

He stood a moment longer in his vantage point of shadows lurking at the corners of the hall, then stepped out and hurried across the room.