That’s data. Next dispatch we can compare the dates and see if they match. “Which priest told you this?”

“One from over the mountains. He was a true priest, not a schismatic like Pope Leo or the Mount Angel monks. He asked me to make a cloth for the altar of the Lord and promised me my prayers would be answered.”

Tiphaine looked at the cloth with its odd symbols. “Did he give you a pattern?”

“No. He put it in my head, as proof he could do miracles.”

Tiphaine nodded, taking a corner of the cloth and looking at it.

“You know,” she said in a conversational tone of voice, “that wasn’t a priest of Holy Mother Church. He was a Priest of the Church Universal and Triumphant out of Corwin.”

“What do I care, so long as I get my revenge for Eddie’s and Jason’s deaths? And my son will rule Oregon!”

Mary stuck the needle in her mouth and sucked it, a moment. She cast another of those sly looks upward and Tiphaine stared, frozen.

Her eyes were black, like windows into . . . not even emptiness. Tiphaine clenched her stomach muscles against a sudden wave of nausea. She blinked. Mary Liu was there, but somehow it wasn’t her. She tossed the cloth aside, and Mary’s hand darted out, jabbing the needle point at Tiphaine. Tiphaine jerked back and the point slid down the back of her right hand, brushing along it ever so gently.

“Hee, hee, hee,” giggled the thing that had been Mary Liu. “Bad cess to you and yours!”

Tiphaine walked over to the door and signaled it open. She turned back.

“Bad cess, bad cess, bad cess . . . You didn’t help Jason out of that cell before the Rangers killed him.”

As a matter of fact, they didn’t kill him. I did. Sandra wanted his mouth shut and the blame put elsewhere. But that was just damage control after he screwed the pooch with your little scheme to use the bandits to attack the Dúnedain. Despite specific orders not to do anything until we were ready to start the Protector’s War. Did you think you wanted Astrid Loring’s head more than I did, you stupid bitch? We weren’t ready. That screwup of yours may well be why Corvallis came in at the worst possible moment, why the Association lost and Norman died.

Tiphaine waited and watched the sitting woman with her idle needle. Slowly the eyes leached out and became blue again and she took up her needle and began the careful, neat, quick stitches of an expert. Tiphaine turned and went downstairs.

Did I actually just see that? Would it be more logical to assume I’m going crazy . . . no. I did just see that.

Then she looked at the sunlight; it was easy to see precisely how far the beams from the windows had moved across the bare floor.