“After a while, Miss Jaenelle leaned back and lifted Lucy’s arm out of the basin. There was a long, deep cut from her elbow to her wrist…and that was all. Miss Jaenelle looked each of us in the eye. She didn’t have to say anything. We weren’t about to tell on her. Then she handed me a jar of ointment, my daughter being too upset to do much. ‘Put this ointment on three times a day, and keep it loosely bandaged for a week. If you do, there’ll be no scar.’

“Then she turned to Lucy and said, ‘Don’t worry. I’ll talk to them. They won’t bother you again.’

“Prince Philip, when he found out Lucy’d gotten hurt because the dogs were chasing her, gave the dog boys a fierce tongue-lashing; but that afternoon I saw Lord Benedict pressing coins into the dog boys’ hands, laughing and telling them how pleased he was they were keeping his dogs in such fine form.

“Anyway, by the next summer, my daughter married a young man from a fine, solid family. They live in a little village about thirty miles from here, and I visit whenever I can get a couple of days’ leave.”

Daemon looked into his empty mug. “Do you think Miss Jaenelle talked to them?”

“She must have,” Cook replied absently.

“So the boys stopped teasing Lucy,” Daemon pressed.

“Oh, no. They went right on with it. They weren’t punished for it, were they? But the dogs…After that day, there was nothing those boys could do to make the dogs chase Lucy.”

Late that night, unable to sleep, Daemon returned to the alcove. He lit a black cigarette and stared at the witchblood through the smoke.

She has come.

He’d spent the evening reviewing the facts he had, turning them over and over again as if that would change them. It hadn’t, and he didn’t like the conclusion he had reached.

My sister planted these. As remembrance.

A child. Witch was still a child.

No. He was misinterpreting something. He had to be. Witch wore the Black Jewels.

Maybe he’d gotten the information mixed up. Maybe Wilhelmina was the younger sister. He’d still been fighting to regain his emotional control when he’d arrived at the Hayllian embassy in Beldon Mor. It would make more sense if Jaenelle was almost old enough to make the Offering to the Darkness. She’d be on the cusp of opening herself to her mature strength, which would be the Black Jewels.

But the bedroom, the clothes. How could he reconcile those things with the power he’d felt when she’d healed his back after Cornelia tied him to the whipping posts?

She talks like that sometimes.

He could count on both hands the people still able to speak a few phrases of the Blood’s true language. Who could have taught her?

He shied away from the answer to that.

It’s a hospital for emotionally disturbed children.

Could a child wear a Jewel as dark as the Black without becoming mentally and emotionally unbalanced? He’d never heard of anyone being gifted with a Birthright Jewel that was darker than the Red.