“Help!” Kero cried. “Lordan won’t live out the night without a Healer—and I need help, too. A magic weapon, something that will make it possible for me to get Dierna away from those bandits—”

A lightning-caller, a tame demon—something that can attack them from a distance so I don’t have to get too close.

“They aren’t bandits, girl,” Kethry interrupted, her brow creased with a frown. “At least, that mage isn’t. Whoever, whatever he is, he’s good, he hid his presence from me right up to the time of the attack—and he wants a virgin girl for something. I would guess he was hired, and the girl is his price for this night’s work. I suspect your father made one enemy too many, and that enemy has decided to extract a complete revenge and end him and his line. Or else—” She gave Kero a sharp glance, and didn’t complete her surmise.

There’s something she knows that I don‘t, Kero realized suddenly. Something she isn’t going to tell me. “I still need a weapon, Grandmother,” she persisted. “And Lordan—”

“Lordan will survive until I get there,” the sorceress said abruptly, turning so quickly that Kero’s heart jumped. “Trust me on that. And as for your going after those bandits—what makes you think you can do anything? You aren’t trained in magery or weaponry.”

“I have to try,” Kero said stubbornly. “I have to. There’s no one else, and you told me what Dierna’s uncle—”

“Why you?” Kethry repeated.

“Why not me?” Kero stood up, as tall as her shaking knees were permitting, and raised her chin defiantly. “Why not me—if you’ll help, I can do it. You did more with less when you were my age.”

She was all worked up and ready to say a lot more, but to her surprise, Kethry nodded. “There’s truth in that, child,” her grandmother said softly. “More truth than you know. And now I know who it is I’ve been waiting for all these years....”

Waiting? For—

“Stay there.” The sorceress crossed the room to one of the shadow-shrouded corners, and bent over a chest, opening it with a creak of iron hinges.

She turned with a long, slender shape in her hands, and as she moved into the light again, Kerowyn could see that it was a sword. Not a very impressive blade; the hilt was plain leather-wrapped metal, and the sheath was just as plain.

“Here,” Kethry said, holding it out to her. “Let’s see if she’ll take to you.”

She? Kero reached forward to take the hilt without thinking, and as she clasped it, Kethry pulled away the sheath.

For a moment, no more than a breath, writing blazed up on the blade itself, as fiery and white-hot as if the sword had just come from the heart of a forge. Kero gasped, but Kethry only nodded, unsurprised.

“She wants you all right, child. You’re the only one of my daughters or granddaughters she’s spoken for. She’s yours now—or you’re hers.” Kethry slid the sheath back over the now perfectly ordinary looking blade. “Take your pick. When she speaks, I don’t think anybody denies her.”