I was back in my body, looking across a battered vestibule into Fengthira’s face. "Ah," she said in pure satisfaction. "At last."

Then she saw me and that smile came, fey and chilling even in mirth.

"What, didst think he’d kiss her forehead and ‘forgive her’—send her off to do better like one of tha mewling priests? Tcha! May be soft, but he’s flesh and blood."

"But—but—"

Her eyes narrowed. "Hast paid no heed at all? To aught he looked? Aught he said? When even her jimping popinjay of a maid could say, T’is a case with her?"

"With her, yes! But he—" I tried to rally. "I thought he—admired her, yes, I thought—"

She gave a veritable horse’s snort. "And when he said, I’ve plans for her, hast never wondered, What?"

"I—uh. . . ."

She snapped her fingers under my nose. "Then soften tha granite head and wonder now! For I tell thee plain, it’s been in his mind since the day he clapped eyes on her. And if tha or thine tries to botch it for him, after all this. . . ."

I gulped and tried not to hold my head on. And then tried in earnest cowardice to think no further. Not to say, He has what he wanted. But at what cost to us?

And is it a prize that can be kept?

I opened my mouth. Fengthira gave me one quelling glower. "Come tha. We’ve eavesdropped enough."

* * * * *

We sat on the fern-walk’s lowest step. The earth rumbled, the lava hissed, withered ferns above us rustled in the gloom. I tried to think, then tried not to think. Fengthira sat quiet, whistling softly through her teeth. But at last she glanced upward, and a small frown rucked her brows.

"I doubt," she remarked, "he’s as little care for time now as if he’d twisted Los Velandryxe himself. But. . . ." Then she rose quickly as scraps of conversation floated down.

". . . use your arts, then. Act without hands. Perfect if you have no hands to act."

"If you think, you coal-eyed femaere, that I’ll totter down there with you under my arm and Los Velandryxe Thira bobbing like a kite in front of me, you’re a bigger fool than you think I am."

"Impossible . . . ?" A splutter. A scuffle. "Oh, mind the step!"

"I am minding it. I’m quite capable of doing that—and this. . . ."

"No, you aren’t, give me that—now see what you’ve done!"

"Much better. You had it half down already, ramping at me up there—"

"You wretch, I’ll look like a, a, haymaker’s wench—"

"Are you still worrying about your looks . . . ?"

Silence, sudden, absolute. Dwindling to a sense of motion, and an abrupt change of tone.

"I still don’t see how you can. . . ."

"Because I’m a fool. You told me that. Fengthira told me, your blighted soothseer told me. Once to fall for you, twice to suffer you, thrice for coming back. It’s only the thought of that eternally sanctified bedpost that got me through."

"Assharral—"

She broke off short. For an instant the flaw crossed his voice as well.

"We’ll deal with Assharral. In its time."

"Fengthira—"

"Fengthira what?"

"Fengthira won’t like it. . . ."

"Fengthira’ll do as I say." Fengthira’s eyes lit in a vivid laugh. "Stop that or you’ll never see a bedpost. I’ll pull your clothes off on these steps."

"But when I get old, what on earth am I going to do?"

"Pour out my tonic and unearth my sticks. . . ."

They reached the top of the stair. For an instant I thought the smoke had wholly gone. His arm was round her waist, one of hers round him, her other arm cradled the Well. The light hung upon them, transfiguring their faces, making them figures of legend who walk in immortal sunlight, where laughter needs no cause but springs like water from a brimming wellhead, the overflow of bliss.

Fengthira watched them descend, an echo of that light in her own eyes. I realized, in wonder, it was Moriana at whom she looked.

Moriana looked back. Her hair had come right down in a sable haystack, her face was indubitably grimed with lava smuts. But her bones were the bones of a Morheage, and the glow waking in her eyes was cold as night in space.

"There’s naught so vexing," Fengthira observed, "as to hear tha’st done better than tha deserts." Her lids crinkled. "Wilt need to keep him on the bit. Else I doubt he’ll give away Assharral when the fit takes him, tha shirt as well as his."

Beryx said indignantly, " ’Thira!" But Moriana twitched and gave one cut-off gasp.

"You don’t . . . you don’t mind. . . ."

Fengthira snorted at her, but not as she had at me. "Dost think he’d pay attention if I did?"

Moriana’s brows snapped down. Tried to stay there, and slid up. The laughter rose behind them, a sudden involuntary runnel pure as the music of Los Morryan: surprise, relief, delight.

With a quelling stare Beryx ordered, "You be quiet." Quite unquelled, she looked up at him through her lashes, gold fireflies alive in velvet black. He looked down. The light was woven in his own eyes, and now it had a softness, the play of sunshine through the tenderest new-sprung leaves. . . .

"When hast time," Fengthira said resignedly, "for aught but love-taps and bedposts, couldst lend ear to this?"

Beryx tore his eyes free. "Oh," he said in some confusion. "Oh, yes. . . ."

His glance found Moriana, who said promptly, "You’ll drop it, octopus." She came forward, the Well in both her hands. Her fingers, her eyes were steady. As if passing over a borrowed needle. As if it had never meant anything to her at all.

"I think," she said, "you should look after this."

Fengthira did not offer to touch it. "Hast rushed tha fence," she retorted. "There’s work for it here."

Moriana looked blank. Beryx reached normality in a bound, then astonishment.

"You don’t mean—but ’Thira, can you? I thought—"

"Wreve-lethar," Fengthira said flatly, "acts on Pharaon Lethar. Since when was that just headsful of air?"

Beryx’s jaw dropped. Moriana looked from one to the other. Half an hour ago, I thought, she would have died before demanding so frankly, "Will somebody explain?"

Fengthira jerked her chin out at Zyphryr Coryan. "Hast a mountain out there falling to pieces and a city melting, and Los Velandryxe under tha hand. Dost know a better time to change the world?"

Moriana’s eyes went to Beryx. He pulled his jaw up. "She means—" He stopped and swallowed. " ’Thira, you did mean, stop the—eruption. Didn’t you?"

Fengthira sighed and rolled her eyes. "Twenty minutes lovebirding and hast lost all tha wits. Nay, I meant walk on water to Eakring Ithyrx. What else would do?"

"Stop the. . . ." Moriana gaped in turn, lovely even in shock. "You could—it can—I didn’t—"

She stopped again. Collecting herself. Gathering herself. To what an effort I realized when she looked back at Fengthira and said, clearly, with deliberation, "I beg your pardon. I didn’t know . . . I never learnt . . . what the Well can do."

I heard Beryx take in his breath and a stab of jealousy recalled when he had responded, with half that joy, that radiance, to a sign of Math in me.

She read his eyes. Her cheeks mantled with a light, lovely blush. She said, "It would be a—good start."

He gave her a lovelier smile. Praise, pride, joy. Then his brows knit. "But ’Thira. . . . Even Wreve-lethar can’t—reverse time."

"Why dost want to reverse it, zany? Well enough if tha canst mend it now."

"Then," said Moriana with decision, "that’s that." And once again she offered Fengthira the Well.

Fengthira merely clicked her tongue and jerked up her chin.

Beryx lost his fuddled air and started backing. "No," he said. "No, ’Thira. The Four forbid. Not me."

"Wilt stop going sideways like a balky colt and use tha head? Needst strength for Los Velandryxe. Tha wast ever more sledge than needle, and t’is sledge that’s needed here."

" ’Thira, no! I don’t have the judgment! The Velandryxe! The—"

"Needst no judgment. There’s but one thing to do. As for Velandryxe—art such a clown, needst not take care for Velandryxe. T’is Velandryxe will look out for thee."

" ’Thira, I’m just not strong enough! I’ve fought it and I know!"

Fengthira’s eyes narrowed. There was a long pause. She frowned. Her eyes turned blank, and revived.

"Cause enough to try it," she muttered. "No cause to shy, that t’was never tried before." She gave Moriana one stabbing glance.

"Tha, girl. Hast the nerve to help him—and the wish—and the will?"

Moriana caught her breath. Glanced from Beryx to Fengthira and back.

"No," said Fengthira. "Tha folk. Tha fault. And tha mate."

Moriana set her teeth, an odd expression on that lovely face. She said, "I’ll try."

"Not try," Fengthira rejoined grimly. "Si’sta, I’ve no way to tell if Wreve-lethar works with double harness. But tha’lt not be playing this time. Knowst what the Well can do if tha only ‘tries.’ And this will be its proper purpose. Canst not try. Tha must."

Their eyes met, and held. Then mischief, the image of Beryx’s, woke in those black depths.

"If it’s a Must," she remarked demurely, "then it must be right—mustn’t it?"

Fengthira snorted. "He’s corrupted thee already. Stint vexing me, then, and do what tha must."

Moriana glanced at Beryx, who took a deep breath. "Where better?" he said. He put an arm round her, and with her still carrying the Well they retreated up the stairs.

Fengthira said absently, "Stand, then," recollected I was not a horse, and amended with irony, "No, sit."

* * * * *

We sat. This time she did not share her farsight, if she used it. When I glanced round she was hunched up, elbows on knees, chin on fists, tension in every line.

My heart speeded up. I rehearsed the risk, the effort, the Well’s power. Moriana’s rawness in the arts, the possible miscarriages, that daunting "must." I made my peace several times over with death. The air did not quake. There were no thunderbolts. I found myself breathing fast. Fengthira said, "Calm thaself. T’will be a good time yet."

I tried to relax, then wondered with fresh alarm if marauders had found our little party at the gate. She replied curtly, "No." I dismantled a fern-frond. She enquired acidly, "How didst last a sentry-watch?" I dropped the pieces and tried to comport myself like a soldier. She observed, "Lookst like a squatter pigeon when tha swellst up like that." I wished with some warmth that neither she nor I had ever been born. She said, "Canst not reverse time." Then with a quick chuckle she gripped my shoulder and said, "Ah, lad, I’m sorry to plague thee. Si’sta, I’m in a pother myself."

That steadied me, as was no doubt intended. I said rather awkwardly, "I know now what you meant."

Aedryx need never ask a gloss. She just nodded and said, "My father called Math and love and mercy a triad to thwart Vorn’s spite. But t’will be better if tha canst give t’others a lead. I doubt they’re so old in Math they’ll let her walk out smelling of roses and say, ‘I’ll make amends.’ They’re more like to lock on the bit. And the filly’s cost him enough."

Thinking of the dead mare, recalling she put horses above men, I reflected that she practiced what she preached. She chuckled. "T’is never easy. Sooner plait ropes in water than follow Ma—"

Her words blew away. The world blew away. Earth, air, my body, all but vision was gone. Instead I beheld Los Velandryxe Thira, poised against a ground of impenetrable black.

But instead of a crystal dewdrop it was a solid orb of crusted green and blue and black and white, the blue of compressed oceans, the green in masses whose shape I had seen on maps, overlaid by ragged whorls of white with black laid like shadows beneath. What told me it was Los Velandryxe Thira was the four hands strained about its girth: a tapering white hand clinched by a strong-knuckled hand whose ancient shield calluses were blurred in scar tissue’s seamy, hairless brown, a crippled claw forced tight by an elegant long-nailed hand with the eclipsed-moon signet on its thumb.

At least, I think it was on the thumb. I still wonder, sometimes, if that thumb was there, or if I saw, face whittled by earth’s shadow, the real moon itself. The hands’ distortion told me what they held was heavier than mountains, that it was spinning as it hurtled with vertiginous momentum through empty space, so for one awful moment I feared that clutch would break. . . .

And then I felt—Everything is the only word for it. I felt everything bump: check: lift like a wheel to a road rut, gather and run, everything from the spin of that inlaid bubble to the course of my own blood.

My stomach swam, my ear channels staggered, my heart found itself out of step and skipped to catch up, my eyes . . . when it was gone, they wanted that image back. But I was seated in the smoke on a stone step in Ker Morrya, with Fengthira gesturing me to quiet.

Scratch of fern fronds, the pound of my heart. Blood’s sough in my ears. Her husk of a whisper. "When couldst last hear that?"

My heart stopped altogether. She rose and walked swiftly out to the loggia beyond the steps.

Smoke blinded us, heat stifled us. A red-hot sword lay down Zyphryr Coryan’s flank. I heard clamor from the city. I heard Fengthira say, more softly yet, "Imsar Math." Then I knew what I could no longer hear.

The thunder in the earth had stopped.

She turned from the smoke wall. "Art a lucky man." She sounded stern, infinitely remote. "Hast seen what none other will, past or future time. Tha Stiriand blood perhaps."

She answered my other questions swiftly as they were thought. "No, tha dost not see the fire running backward into Haz’s belly or the smoke gone in an eye-blink or Zyphryr Coryan ten years ahead. He’s a good lad, and wiser than he knows. Next best to hold tha hand is knowing when to stop."

Then her eyes lit up. She laughed like a girl and flicked a finger across my nose. "Content thee, Granite-eyes. They’ve done it. Mountain’s back to sleep." And she ran lightly, swifter than any maiden, through the loggia and up the steps.

* * * * *

I did not follow. I waited till they came, trooping down together, easy now, slandering each other and fighting the battle over like all soldiers, their clothes patched white with sweat, Beryx and Moriana arm in arm, the Well tucked negligently in Fengthira’s elbow crook. Three aedryx with the shine of joy and magic and victory on them, remote from mortal men.

Then Fengthira tapped my elbow, asking, "Wilt wait the smoke out to be sure?" Beryx demanded with urgency, "For the Four’s sake help me with these women, Fylghjos," and Moriana, that soft new sheen in her eyes brightening to a kindly mischief, murmured, "What did you do with the last surcoat, Alkir?"

I had just wit to retort, "Protected imperial bloodstock, ma’am." Before their laughter drew me into the fellowship.

As we entered the loggia, Beryx looked eagerly out into the smoke. Then he broke step, pausing, drawing in a long, long breath. "Now," he said, and I knew he was invoking that promise made to Rema, for the dawn she would not see. "Now we can start."

* * * * *

I followed them through the murk, half soaring willy-nilly on the updraft of that happiness, half crying in curdled hate and desperation, You can forgive her. Fengthira has. But how can we forgive all that she has done?

And then, in mouth-drying fear, How can you start, until you get past us?

We came down the last steps. Onto the threshold. Under Ker Morrya’s gate. What plan, if any, Beryx had made, I have no idea. My own brain was dry. I saw the faces turn, the bodies jump, the action beginning, inevitable as the shift of a phalanx-front.

Evis and Sivar had sprung forward in relief. Zyr shouted, "Ha-ha—" and the Axairan triumph yell died in his throat. Before my eyes their faces turned to sword-blades, sharp and pitiless, all leveled on Moriana in our midst.

She had pulled from Beryx’s arm, chin up and backbone stiffening, the softness gone. He tried to catch at her and she almost pushed him off. Her head went back as I had seen it on the parapet of Los Morryan. But though her eyes were huge and somber as Ker Morrya’s smoke pall, the mockery, the cruel amusement had disappeared.

Before she could speak Beryx flung words out with bare desperate haste. "We stopped the fire—the mountain’s back asleep!"

It barely distracted them. Evis gave a brush of the hand. Wenver and Amver had let the boys go. They were all beginning to close in.

"I said we did it!" He had some authority back. As their eyes involuntarily came round he caught her hand and held it despite her jerk. "I couldn’t have done it, without her."

He stared around them, joy lost, all-too-helpless fear becoming something else. But this time Moriana spoke.

"I have renounced the Well," she said.

It came flatly as an ultimatum. She would not sue mercy, excuse herself, let alone offer apologies to such a reception. But, I realized, she was trying to unbend. Doing a Morheage’s best to announce amends.

The stealthy, all but involuntary advance had stopped. Ost stared, Uster blinked, a moment’s comprehension showed in Karis’ eyes. The boys had crept forward, riveted as the rest. Quick, I besought some unknown god, let me weight the scalepan. Give me something to say.

I hesitated an instant too long. It was Zyr whose eyes slitted. Zyr whose voice, lowered to a gravel-slide, broke out, "The Well. And what about the rest? Our folk? The army? Assharral?"

"Zyr, stop!" Beryx shouted in pure panic this time. "I told you—don’t let it make you Ammath!"

Evis half-checked. Zyr’s eyes rolled, the glare of the berserker before he loses all control. And some great shove sent me leaping to stand braced like a shoulderman at Moriana’s rather than Beryx’s back.

"Wait," I cried in turn. "Wait, stop—think!"

I had no weapon. I knew no weapon would help us now. I could only try to make my eyes say it. You’ve followed him this far. Will you destroy him in his first taste of happiness? Will you pervert yourselves and smash all hope of a future to avenge what, however cruelly, is already gone?

If nothing else, I could not add ignominiously, if you destroy me along with my lord, don’t do it in front of my sons.

"Don’t," Beryx was saying huskily. The sweat was running down his jaw. "For the love of Math, Evis . . . Zyr . . . Wenver . . . wait. Think." Something told me that if they refused he would not hinder them. Would not attack them, might not even resist. But they would only come to Moriana after they had hacked him apart at her feet.

"Try to—look forward." His voice shook. "You needn’t—fall in the pit. You can go on. Try to—to—"

To be more than human. To achieve what in all her time the Lady had never done. To make one giant’s stride out, free, over the past, and arrive at magnanimity. Greatness of soul.

Math.

They were poised as Moriana had hung, a leaf in the wind’s eye, on that parapet. But there was no mercy. No heed. Not in Evis, not in Wenver’s, not in any of their eyes.

And as it all teetered to the precipice edge, Zem piped up.

He had wormed to Evis’ side. I have no idea how much he understood. Probably, I fear, far too much. But he spoke with his age’s single-minded satisfaction at a long-standing puzzle solved.

"So that," he said, "is what you planned to do with her."

For a moment we were all paralyzed. Then Moriana’s eyes flamed. Evis’ jaw dropped and Beryx yelled in awful consternation, "Zem, you wretch!"

Moriana rounded on him. He literally ducked. "It wasn’t like that!"

"Oh, it wasn’t, was it?" She had turned whiter than on that parapet. "You dared talk about me like a—a—and to a child!"

She swung at him, a barrack-room roundhouse. He howled, "I never said a word, I never thought, I swear it. . . ." She charged him and he actually ran, round Fengthira and back behind me, the good arm over his head like a farmer caught in hail. Moriana swept down on us both. I had no time for fight or flight. He yelled across my shoulder, panicked to the point of burlesque, "I did tell you, I had plans!"

He was cowering like the most hen-hearted recruit behind a sentry-post, holding me before him one-handed, peering past my neck. I did not have to see how it looked. That was written in Moriana’s face beside me, the eyes huge, the skin white, the mouth. . . .

The mouth suddenly twitching uncontrollably. The face’s mask shattering, the eyes, yet again, turning to sheets of black-shot mist. And then, bursting out like a dam gone down, the full depth of that waterfall laugh.

How could the most vendetta-crusted blood-thirst resist that?

I can see Evis crumbling behind her, the swept-away look on Zyr’s face. Karis and Wenver had succumbed, it swept the circle like some new, precious plague. I felt the rocks buckle in my own memory’s wall. Saw the future rise beyond the rubble at last, clear and irresistible as a trumpet calling, Stand down.

When the flood ebbed Beryx was still lurking, wringing the moment to its last. Moriana caught her breath along with us. Then she spluttered and cried, "Oh, you fool! Come out!"

He crept out, not done burlesquing himself. She gave him one fulminating, not wholly counterfeit glower. Then it changed.

"You did that on purpose." It was half outrage, half disbelief. "Ran away . . . Pretended. . . ." Her voice rose. "Deliberately!"

He looked at her under his lashes. Though in his bent head that mock-timidity lingered, the corners of his mouth had crept up. But it was not foolery, when he spoke.

He said, "The Ulven called me, Rainmaker."

I remembered, then, what it had meant. Leveled in that laughter’s wake I understood, through flesh and blood’s reality, what it meant now: my chest’s enlargement, my blood moving, heart and spirit released. As if the hate had been not merely a wall but stasis, stagnation, the suspension of time that drought imposes. A living death.

And now it had broken. Life, water, time, could move again.

The others remembered too. But a different memory, more than understanding, was moving like another freshet in Moriana’s stare.

Then she turned her head and looked me full in the face.

"Alkir"—that lovely liquid voice was lovelier for the evil it had sloughed—"we can’t go back. And no recompense would be enough. But we could go on—couldn’t we?" And she held out her hand.

T’would need a Velandyr, I heard Fengthira saying, to amend that. And, unless tha dost the same, t’will be fare-thee-well ’twixt him and thee. But the choice had already been made, in my own mind. My own heart.

Her fingers curled, slight and fragile as vine stems, round mine. I heard Beryx say low and thickly, "Well done." I did not ask which of us he meant. I felt the spring of his joy waken, though, as I looked at the others. And if his eye had pleaded, I did my utmost to make mine a fierce command.

They understood. And at the last, they could not turn their backs on the liberation that had taken them, however unawares.

Evis conceded first, advancing with past hate and present disapproval and undigested laughter still mingled in his look. As Moriana met his eye an answer woke in hers. But she bit her lip ferociously, and it sounded almost earnest when she spoke.

"Whatever we say will be . . ." impossible, I supplemented. An insult, a grotesquerie, or a wound too raw to touch. "But. . . ."

She pulled her chin up in that old implacable way. But I saw her shoulders brace, before, again, she put out her hand.

Evis took it, perforce. With a pause, a gingerliness close to revulsion. Then past training rescued him. He bowed over her fingers and uttered a cliché from another life. "I wish you happy, ma’am." His eye found Beryx’s suddenly radiant face and he amended with no reservation and no effort at all, "Happier than anyone could ask."

One by one the rest followed, mumbling something, clasping hands. Stepping back, with a look of woken wonder on each face. Until only Zyr remained.

He glowered at us across the shifting but persistent glacis they had all left. His narrow bronze-red face was laconic at the best of times and now quite inscrutable, but in the pause I heard Beryx suddenly catch his breath.

Moriana stiffened. She did not put out her hand. I would have prayed, if I had a god left, that the pride, the mockery, had not revived in her eyes.

Zyr looked at Beryx instead.

Beryx did not speak, but I knew what his eyes would say. Don’t hold back, they would beg. Do this for your own sake. It’s human, it’s natural to grieve and demand punishment and thirst for revenge exacted in blood, but don’t do it. Be more than human. Cleave to Math.

Zyr looked back to Moriana. He jerked one shoulder to the corpses under the arch and said evenly, "For me, you should be hanging with them." He paused. "But. . . ."

His eyes flicked to Beryx again, and that glance said it all. If I can’t do this for your reasons, neither can I deny you. What you made me feel. That moment’s overwhelming, cleansing laughter, when the hate broke. I will do this for what you mean to me.

Then he caricatured an imperial salute and took a step back. I will not touch you, said that dour glance, in reconciliation. But I will sanction your passage. Into amnesty. Into hope.

Moriana’s chin came down. Beryx bent his head. Softly, huskily, and I could feel with what intensity, he said, "Thank you, Zyr."

* * * * *

And I remember the next advance, that evening, after a trial restoration in Ker Morrya: a dozen different work-parties to clear debris, stable horses, forage dinner, gather splintered furniture for firewood, organize quarters, succor the corpses at the gate. Barricade the gate itself.

We gathered in a cleansed piece of the great gallery, lit by tallow dips in silver candelabra, reclining on salvaged cushions or Phaxian cloaks, as we ate pot-luck soup and griddle cakes and drank barley-spirit too raw even for looters from a crystal decanter they had missed. Beryx and Moriana presided, sharing his cloak, with Fengthira on his right and me on Moriana’s left; which might still have been unnerving, had she ever been aware of me. As of course she was not.

When the motley cups were charged there came a sudden pause. I had felt it happening all afternoon: the recurring tug-of-heart between hope and resurrected memory, the embers of grief and hate rousing, to be re-drowned by another deluge of their joy. This time it was clearer, simpler. The moment, the action, demanded the stamp of ritual. But was it to be a mourners’ wake? Or a betrothal feast?

Fengthira glanced sideways and sighed. Neither Beryx nor Moriana heard. She looked past, with irony and mockery and the involuntary, if often wry smile forced from all who looked at them, and told me, "Tha’ll do. Give us a toast."

I stood up. Cleared my throat. Cleared it again. Waited. Bellowed, "Stand to!" They leapt apart, the audience fell apart. Beryx gave me a wrathfully merry look. I gave them the toast.

"Tomorrow," I said.

In a moment, Zyr’s hand relaxed. Then Evis lifted his cup. Wenver and Ost nodded, looking past me too. "Tomorrow," they repeated, and tipped their cups.

Beryx and Moriana drank with us, with fitting solemnity. But they drank to each other, which Fengthira found too much.

"Hark’ee," she said. "This billing and cooing’s half-measure to ye, and no use to us. Get y’selves off to the real thing—if ye can find a bed that’s fit for it."

Beryx blushed. Moriana dropped her eyelids, smiled wickedly, and pulled him to his feet. She glanced down at Fengthira, and Fengthira anticipated the sally in her look.

"If th’art foundered by morning, remember, t’was thee schooled him to do without sleep."

That routed Moriana at last. As she went crimson Beryx said irately, " ’Thira, that’s enough!" and hauled her doorward before Fengthira could show just how little his orders weighed with her.

FiveStar Books

Copyright © 2007 by Sylvia Kelso