With a snarl of rage, the dyrmagnos summoned a single dra’gorgos, which bore Klia back to the tower and dumped her at Rhazat’s feet outside the dining room. The dyrmagnos pointed down the corridor.

“I think, my dear, that it’s time you did a bit of cooking.”

She pushed Klia, propelling her down the corridor to a door she hadn’t seen before, one that hadn’t been there when she’d searched, she was certain. Throwing it open, Rhazat shoved her in and slammed it shut behind her, leaving Klia alone in an archaic kitchen—a small, windowless room with a single table and a green fire leaping on the hearth of a huge stone fireplace. As Klia’s eyes adjusted to the dimness, she saw that there were haunches of meat hanging from hooks in the ceiling beams. But there was something odd about them: the shapes.

Klia staggered back until she slammed into the door. The haunches were arms and legs. Sedge’s head regarded her with dead eyes from a trencher on the table.

Falling to her hands and knees, Klia vomited up everything left in her stomach, then kept retching until there was nothing but bile to come up. “Illior—Sakor—”

How could she pray with human meat stuck in her teeth?

A nasty chuckle came from the shadows of a corner. Rhazat stepped out into the unnatural light. “Would you like me to tell you who you had for breakfast, my dear?”

“No—please, no.” Klia crawled away from the mess and pulled herself up by the table.

“You’re alive and well fed. Didn’t I serve you your favorite dishes, the ones you wished to see? Wishes are powerful things.”

“Why?”

“What else was I supposed to do, send Zella into Deep Harbor with a market basket? I only eat their lives. I have no use for the bodies. But waste not, want not, eh?”

Klia stood gripping the edge of the table, rocked and sickened by this revelation.

“I’ve been simply aching to eat your life, Klia,” Rhazat said, advancing on her. “How sweet it will taste, so wonderfully tainted. However will you live with the knowledge?”

“You’ve sealed my fate, you know. And your own,” Klia gritted out. “I’ll never eat another mouthful in this place.”

Rhazat laughed merrily at that, the mask firmly back in place. “You are dramatic, and so easily gulled. Look again, Klia, at our larder.”

The arms and legs were haunches of meat again, sheep by the look of them, and a skinned sheep’s head lay in the trencher where Sedge’s head had been.

“You must allow me my little amusements. Of course, it’s a riddle. Which illusion is the real one?” Rhazat opened the kitchen door and let her back into the corridor, then slipped her arm through Klia’s and led her upstairs to Klia’s bedchamber.