Jaenelle Saetien picked up the printed list and shuffled back to bed. She shoved the list under one of the pillows and remembered the last thing Witch had said to her.
“If it’s the name that’s getting in your way, then change your name to something that won’t remind people of me. Daemon won’t care. I doubt he chose that name in the first place.”
FORTY-SEVEN
*Daemon. The debt is paid. Go home.*
Daemon rushed through the open front door and into the great hall, where Beale waited for him.
“Any problems here?” he asked.
“No, High Lord.” Beale studied him. “Would you prefer I use a different title?”
“No,” he said softly. For most of the Blood, he would never be Prince Daemon Sadi again. He wondered if Saetan had felt the extra weight of being the High Lord once it became known throughout the Realms. No stepping back from it now. For any of them. “Where is Surreal?”
“In her suite. We persuaded her to get some rest now that the young Lady woke up and was bathed and had a bite to eat.”
He couldn’t think about the young Lady yet, wasn’t ready to face what was left of Jaenelle Saetien. He moved swiftly through the corridors, acknowledging the footmen and maids with just a look. When he reached Surreal’s suite, he knocked on her sitting room door and then entered before being given permission. But as he crossed the threshold, he leashed every part of himself as tightly as he could.
“Surreal?” He said her name softly, unwilling to disturb her if she was asleep—and unwilling to walk into her bedroom without her permission in order to check on her. That room was her sanctuary, and he spent time with her there as an invited guest.
She appeared in the doorway between the rooms, looking exhausted and fragile. “Sadi?” She ran across the room and threw herself into his arms.
He held her, his hands moving over her head and back to caress and reassure. “I’m sorry I couldn’t be here to help you. I am sorry for that.”
“Did that bitch Fharra get everything she deserved?” Her words were muffled, spoken against his chest.
“She did. They all did.” He couldn’t ease her back enough to get a good look at her, so he settled her more comfortably against him. “Sweetheart, did you get any rest?”
She shook her head. “I couldn’t . . . It was easier to keep watch.” She finally leaned back and looked at him. “Have you seen her?”
“Not yet. I wanted to see you first, make sure you were all right.” He kissed her lips. A gentle kiss, for comfort.
Surreal clung to him for a moment. “You need to see her.” A hesitation. “Will you stay with me tonight?”
“Yes.” He gave her another kiss, one with a little more heat. A promise.
Then he walked to his daughter’s suite to find out how much of a debt she had owed.
When her father walked into her bedroom, Jaenelle Saetien almost tumbled out of bed in her haste to reach him. Her legs still wobbled, so she stopped halfway and waited for him.
He stared at her face, at her eyes. Finally at the Purple Dusk.
Then he crossed the room, pulled her into his arms, pressed his face against her head—and began to cry.
It was the most terrible sound she’d ever heard because it was coming from him.
“Papa,” she soothed, patting his back. “Don’t cry, Papa. Please don’t cry.”
As his emotions swamped her, she began to cry, too, when she realized he wasn’t crying because of what she had lost; he was crying out of relief that she hadn’t been so corrupted by Delora and the coven of malice to have earned being executed.
FORTY-EIGHT
“Are you sure about this?”
“Everything has a price.”
Personally, Karla thought Witch had paid more than enough, lifetimes of enough. And this price would shake the Realm.
She knocked on the door, handed her card to the butler, who handed it to Lady Zhara’s Steward, who wasn’t able to hide his fear as he hurried to ascertain if the Queen of Amdarh would grant this audience—and would subject her granddaughter to this requested meeting.
There was no real question about Zhara granting this audience or about Zoey being there—only a fool would defy a Gray-Jeweled Black Widow Queen—but Karla appreciated the Steward having enough balls to go through the formalities.
Dhemlan was in turmoil since the girls who had fallen into that unnatural sleep rose from wherever they had been in the abyss. Delora and Hespera woke up, their Birthright Jewels looking like a thinned transparent eggshell filled with ash. That kind of destruction of a Jewel and its reservoir of power was something no one had seen before—and no one wanted to see again. The two girls had screamed for two days, occasionally babbling about pretty poison and feeling Krellis and Dhuran raping them over and over while they wore different bodies.
On the third day, their hearts stopped beating; their lungs refused to take another breath. Their bodies became a different kind of shell while their Selves went to the final death and became whispers in the Darkness.
Leena and Tacita had returned with their Jewels empty, their power broken back to basic Craft. They, too, whimpered about a pretty poison. On the same day that Delora and Hespera died, both girls slipped away from their family homes and wandered through the woods. Leena went to a nearby farm, and Tacita went to a cottage on the outskirts of the village. They’d been to those places before, watched Dhuran and Clayton break a girl from each of those families before giving the girls to some of the village rough boys, minor aristos who had ended up killing those girls for the fun of it.
The rough boys had mysteriously disappeared a few days after the news about the execution of the young men who had done the coven of malice’s bidding. An elderly Warlord reported to his District Queen that he’d heard a tree crying and begging for forgiveness. But it hadn’t been the first time that this man had claimed to hear a peculiar sound. The Queen and the Black Widow who served in her First Circle heard nothing when they went to investigate, and her men could find no indication that the soil around the tree had been disturbed.
Not that anyone would ever find those rough boys. The Sadist was a very good gravedigger, and he’d been busy cleaning up a few problems.
Leena and Tacita had wandered until they found the exact spots where the girls had died. Found the plant with the bloodred, black-throated flowers. Before their families located them, the girls had eaten a few of the petals—and the witchblood slowly bloomed in their bellies, giving unrelenting pain that was finally relieved by death.
What made the District Queens and Province Queens uneasy was the way Leena and Tacita kept asking if the debt was finally paid. Apparently it was, since both girls looked relieved when they took that final breath.
Most of the accomplices who had assisted Delora and her friends had been broken back to basic Craft. Those who had retained their Birthright Jewels discovered the Jewels were weirdly diminished. Instead of holding a reservoir of power, the power seemed to drain . . . somewhere. No one had seen a Jewel behave this way, and queries sent to the Keep had received no reply. And knowing how often Daemon Sadi visited the Keep—and had done so for centuries—no one was willing to go to Ebon Askavi to make direct inquiries and cross paths with him.