Seeing the contained grief in Jaenelle’s eyes, Lucivar didn’t need to ask if she’d been told about Lord Magstrom’s death. He almost asked if she wanted to postpone the meeting, but didn’t bother. There was something else in her eyes that told him she would see this meeting through, for her own reasons.

He eyed the large flat case that stood near her traveling bag. She had several cases like that of different sizes that contained the wooden frames she used to weave her various webs.

“You’re expecting to weave a healing web that size?” he asked.

“It’s not for a healing web; it’s for the shadow.”

He eyed the case again. A “shadow” was an elaborate illusion that could fool the eye into believing a person was really there. Jaenelle could create one that was so realistic, the only difference between it and her real body was that, while the shadow could pick up or touch anything, it couldn’t be touched. She had made that kind of shadow eight years ago, when she had begun her search for Daemon to bring him out of the Twisted Kingdom, and he still clearly remembered the kind of physical toll it had taken.

“Do you feel well enough to channel that much power through your body to make the shadow capable of doing an extensive healing?”

“There won’t be much healing required,” Jaenelle replied calmly.

That wasn’t the impression he or Saetan had gotten from Jorval’s urgent letters, but he knew better than to say anything. Serving Jaenelle in the past few years had taught him when to yield.

She vanished the case and traveling bag, then picked up a hooded, full-length black cape. “Shall we go?”

4 / Kaeleer

Kartane SaDiablo restlessly paced the sitting room of his suite.

The bitch was late. If he’d been home, the bitch wouldn’t have dared keep Dorothea’s son waiting. Hell’s fire, he’d almost be glad to get back to Hayll.

Working himself up to insulted outrage, he almost missed the quiet knock on the door. He pulled himself together. He needed this bitch, who, Jorval assured him, was the best Healer in Kaeleer. If he was uncivil, nothing and no one could stop her from walking out the door again.

He walked over to the windows and looked out. There was no reason for her to know he had been waiting anxiously, no reason to give her even that little bit of power over him. “Come in,” he said when the knock sounded again.

He didn’t hear the door open, but when he turned around, a figure shrouded in a hooded black cape stood inside the room.

At first he thought it was that witch Dorothea called the Dark Priestess, but there was something slimy about the Dark Priestess’s psychic scent and this one’s scent…