He was a man who understood women. Unable to stand the pity in the servants’ eyes when they had helped her into the bath the first few days after the healing, she had insisted that she didn’t need help. Using Craft, she was able to undress and get herself into the tub but wasn’t able to wash herself well enough, especially because the reaction to the poisons was causing her skin to slough off at a grotesque rate. One evening, Daemon had shown up to assist her. She had snapped at him, had told him to go away. His answer, spoken in such a pleasant voice it had taken her a few seconds to comprehend the words, was so creatively obscene she was in the tub being gently, but thoroughly, washed before she could think again. His touch hadn’t been impersonal, nor had it been sexual, but by the time he’d started massaging her scalp, she’d been awash in sensual pleasure like she’d never experienced before.

So she understood why the others were worried. A woman could easily become addicted to that touch, would be willing to do a great many things in order to prevent it from being withdrawn. And Jaenelle had been acting strange since the first attack. But she didn’t think it had anything to do with Daemon.

There was one other thing she knew about Daemon Sadi, something she had seen in the tangled web that had warned her about her own death: he was the friend who would become an enemy in order to remain a friend.

3 / Kaeleer

“What is it about Daemon that scares the shit out of Lucivar?” Andulvar asked as soon as the four men entered a small sitting room in the Keep.

“I don’t know,” Saetan replied, avoiding their stares by warming a glass of yarbarah over a tongue of witchfire.

He didn’t know. Lucivar had always evaded talking about the times he and Daemon had tangled when they’d come together in Terreillean courts. Lucivar had said once that if he had a choice of going up against the Sadist or the High Lord, he would choose the High Lord because he would have some chance of winning.

What was it about that smile of Daemon’s that could shake Lucivar so badly? What was it about the Sadist that could make a man as aggressive as Lucivar back down? And what might Daemon’s presence in the Keep mean to the rest of them?

“High Lord!” Prothvar jerked Saetan’s hand away from the tongue of witchfire just before the yarbarah began to boil.

Saetan put the glass down. The yarbarah wouldn’t be drinkable.

“SaDiablo,” Andulvar said quietly, “should we be watching our backs?”

It didn’t occur to him to offer a reassuring lie. “I don’t know.”

4 / Kaeleer