He could have an answer, or he could save the woman.
“There’s nothing more to talk about.” He took a step toward her. “Let me see your arms.” Between his father’s lessons and instructions from Nurian, the Eyrien Healer in Ebon Rih, he knew enough basic healing Craft to stanch the wounds and had them wrapped by the time the Healer arrived to do the full healing.
He helped the Healer escort Tersa up to her bedroom. Leaving them, he climbed the stairs to the attic and followed the blood trail to a worktable. His gorge rose as he looked at multiple tangled webs saturated with her blood.
This wasn’t normal. He knew enough about Black Widows and their Craft to know that much. What had she needed to see that had driven her to do this?
The spider silk hung from the wooden frames, the threads of the tangled webs of dreams and visions broken to keep other Black Widows from seeing what she had seen.
He wanted to clean the blood off the floor, off the stairs, off the table in the sitting room. He didn’t feel qualified to clear away the remnants of her tangled webs, and he admitted, with sorrow, that it would be better for Uncle Daemon to see everything before the cleanup.
Manny, who had been out and about the village, returned flustered and scared by this turn in Tersa’s mental instability. She sent Mikal next door for the pot of soup she’d made the previous day, and then went about making rolls to go with the soup. Then she sent him to the butcher’s for a roast she could cook and then slice wafer thin. Tersa preferred her meat in very thin slices.
While Manny agreed that they needed to leave the blood trail on the attic stairs and in the attic until Daemon saw it, she set Daemonar to work on cleaning up the blood in the sitting room. Helene, the housekeeper at the Hall, arrived with two of the footmen. They used Craft to lift the furniture so that she could take the bloodstained carpet back to the Hall to clean it.
When the puppies tried to climb the stairs to the bedrooms, he and Mikal took them up to Tersa’s room for a brief visit. She looked docile—and ill—but the puppies made her smile. The Healer assured them she would be all right, but she’d lost a lot of blood and needed to stay quiet for a few days.
When she fell asleep, they returned the puppies to the basket in the kitchen. Mikal went back upstairs to take the first watch.
Daemonar sat in the kitchen with Manny and waited for his uncle to arrive.
It took Daemon an hour to remove the tangled webs from their wooden frames and burn the blood-saturated threads with witchfire. He made note of the spools of spider silk that were on the table and had been contaminated by blood, and burned those too. He would replace them in a few days.
He cleaned the wooden frames and scrubbed the blood off the worktable and the floor, using muscle until muscle alone wouldn’t remove the final stains. Then he used Craft to pull the blood from the wood in the table and floor.
She’d done this before Daemonar arrived at the cottage. Had she seen something in one of those webs that had told her why the boy was there? What else had she seen that she would require Daemonar to make such a terrible choice?
Once the room was clean and all the supplies needed for the Hourglass’s Craft were neatly put away, Daemon shrugged into his black tailored jacket, straightened the cuffs of his silk shirt, and went downstairs to hear the full accounting of what happened.
He listened without interrupting. Daemonar’s shaking hands were a reminder that the boy might be a man and a warrior, but he was still young. He’d held until it was safe to let go, to let someone else shoulder the burden.
“Did I make the right choice?” Daemonar asked.
Daemon stood and pulled his nephew into his arms. “There was no other choice to make, boyo.” And her warning about a knife in my heart is enough of an answer. We will hunt and we will fight, regardless of the cost.
The boy held on hard, his cheek pressed against Daemon’s shoulder. Then he whispered, “She scared me. Not just because she was bleeding that way. She didn’t sound like Tersa.”
Or maybe she did, Daemon thought. Maybe this was the Black Widow she would have been, the one who, even broken, had had the power and courage to look into a tangled web and see Witch being shaped by dreams and needs, rising out of the abyss. A feral intelligence. A midnight, sepulchral voice. It must have taken a certain kind of strength and madness to look at what was coming, all of what was coming. She’d done her best for me and Lucivar. She still did. And whoever she had been before she became what she is now? I’ll let that forgotten girl sleep. I must.
He held on to Daemonar, using a light soothing spell to comfort and help the boy relax.
“Do you want to stay at the Hall tonight?” Daemon asked.
The boy hesitated. “I’d like to go to Ebon Askavi, unless you need to be there.”
He needed to talk to Witch and Karla about what Tersa had done, but not tonight when his mother needed him here—and not when the boy needed to talk to his auntie J. “You go. And let your father know when you arrive.” Lucivar would know the moment Daemonar returned to Ebon Rih, but there was no reason to get sloppy about courtesy.
“Yes, sir.” Daemonar loosened his hold and eased back enough to look at Daemon. “The knife that’s supposed to nick your heart. Do you think that was an image to represent an emotional wound or did she see an actual blade?”
Daemon brushed the boy’s hair away from his face and kissed his forehead before saying softly, “It doesn’t matter, does it? We will do what needs to be done.”
THIRTY-FIVE
He used to sprawl like that when he was little, but you’d think he’d learn to sleep more neatly at his age,” Karla said as she watched Daemonar. “The way those limp wings fan out, there will never be enough room for anyone else in his bed.”
“I slept with a grown man, an eight-hundred-pound Arcerian cat, and a Sceltie,” Witch replied. “I managed.”
“But they were all rather neat packages, despite the various sizes. He’s . . .” She waved a hand.
“I can hear you,” Daemonar mumbled.
Karla eyed the boy. She’d used a light hand with the sedative she’d put in the witch’s brew, but when he finally stopped talking and moving last night, he went down like a felled tree. And just as sprawled, with his limbs flopping every which way once he stretched out on the padded bench in the sitting room across from the Queen’s suite.
“Can you?” she asked doubtfully. “Your eyes aren’t open.”
“Funny thing about Eyriens. We don’t hear with our eyes.”
“Hmm.”
He rubbed his eyes and got them open. “Aren’t Healers supposed to know the difference between eyes and ears?”
“Same number of letters,” Witch said cheerfully. “And both words start with e. Not that hard to confuse one with the other.”
He groaned. “Please, Auntie J. It’s too early for you both to be playful.”
Karla looked at Witch. “I think he’s awake.” She leaned over to bring her face in line with the boy’s and smiled brightly. “Kiss kiss.”
“Only if there’s coffee.”
She laughed. “I’ll see about getting you some before we throw you off the mountain.”