Daemon went through it piece by piece, touching everything, growing more hopeful and more frantic with each discarded item. When there was nothing left to check, his trembling fingers slid along the inside walls, his tactile sense becoming a conductor for the inner senses.

Kneeling on the floor, exhausted by disappointment, he leaned forward until his hand touched the far back corner of the wardrobe.

Lightning pulsed through him until he thought his blood would boil.

Puzzled, he cupped his hands and created a small ball of witchlight. He studied the corner, vanished the witchlight, and leaned back on his heels, even more puzzled.

There was nothing there…and yet there was. Nothing his physical senses could engage, but his inner senses insisted something was there.

Daemon reached forward again and shivered.

The room was suddenly, intensely cold.

His thinking was slowed by fatigue, and it took him a full minute to understand what the cold meant.

“Forgive me,” he whispered as he carefully withdrew his hand. “I didn’t mean to invade your private place. I swear by the Jewels it won’t happen again.”

With trembling hands, Daemon replaced the clothes and shoes exactly the way he’d found them, extinguished the candle-light, and silently glided back to his room. Once there, he dug out the bottle of brandy hidden in his own wardrobe and took a long swallow.

It didn’t make sense. He could understand finding her psychic scent in the library. But in the child’s room? Not on the toys, but on the clothes, on the bed-things an adult might handle daily if she took care of the child. When he had made an innocuous comment about there being another daughter, he’d been told, snappishly, that she wasn’t at home, that she was ill.

Was his Lady assuming a Healer’s duties? Had she slept in a cot in the girl’s room in order to be nearby? Where was she now?

Daemon put the brandy away, undressed, and slid into bed. Tersa’s warning about the chalice cracking frayed his nerves, but there was nothing he could do. He couldn’t hunt for her as he had in other courts. She was nearby, and he couldn’t risk being sent away.

Daemon punched his pillow and sighed. When the child returned, his Lady would return.

And he would be waiting.

4 / Terreille

Surreal tilted her head back, smiling at the sun’s warmth on her face and the smell of clean sea air. Her moontime had passed; tonight she would begin working for her keep to pay Deje back for her kindness. But the day was hers, and as she meandered up the path that led to Cassandra’s Altar, she enjoyed the rough landscape, the sun on her back, the crisp autumn wind teasing her long black hair.

When she rounded a bend and saw the Sanctuary, Surreal wrinkled her nose and sighed. She’d trekked all this way to see a ruin. Even though she was just beginning what might be a long, long life, she had already lived enough years to see that places where she had stayed sometimes had become crumbled piles of stone by the time she next returned. What was ancient history for so many was actual memory for her. She found the thought depressing.