Louvaen slapped her palm to her forehead. “Gods, when did you become so stubborn?”
“When I stopped being ten years old and understood that while you’re my older sister, you aren’t my mother.”
Cinnia’s remark, declared in a matter-of-fact voice, stole Louvaen’s breath. She collapsed in her chair and gazed at her sister for several quiet moments. Something profound had just shifted between them. When Mercer’s second wife Abigail died, the thirteen-year old Louvaen had assumed the running of the household and the parenting of the five-year old Cinnia. While difficult in many respects, the tasks had come naturally to her, and both father and younger daughter had fallen easily into the pattern of following the forceful oldest child’s direction. Louvaen grew queasy at the idea that over the years she’d turned into the family tyrant in her bid to protect those she loved. For the first time, Cinnia had truly rebelled against her, and Louvaen floundered.
“If I return without you, Papa will never forgive me.” She reached for Cinnia’s hand. “Please, come home with me. We’ll figure out a way to defeat Jimenin.”
Cinnia clasped her fingers and squeezed. “Papa will understand and wish me well when you tell him I’m perfectly fine and enjoying my stay at Ketach Tor. And we already have the means to appease Jimenin.” She offered a tentative smile. “For once, you’ll have to trust that I can not only rescue myself but help our family just like you do.”
Louvaen studied her stocking feet, exhaled a long sigh and finally met Cinnia’s calm gaze. “I often tell people there’s far more to you than a beautiful face. Maybe I need to remind myself of the same occasionally.”
Cinnia grinned. “Maybe.” The grin transformed to a relieved laugh, and the two sisters embraced. “Will you stop arguing with me long enough to have some supper and see the room Magda readied for you? Even if I agreed to go with you, we’d have to wait out the weather.”
Louvaen’s stomach gave a loud gurgle. She patted it into submission. “I can use a bite.” She captured Cinnia before the girl could run off to the kitchen. “First, you tell me why your courtly Gavin isn’t here by your side to guard against me stealing you back from him.”
The most blood-chilling cry she’d ever heard answered her, reverberating up through the floor as if some poor creature was being butchered alive. The fine hairs on her nape stood on end. She wouldn’t be surprised if those on her head were doing the same. “Merciful gods, what was that?”
Besides a pitying flinch, Cinnia appeared unconcerned by the inhuman shrieks echoing throughout the hall. “Lord de Sauveterre is...ill.”
Louvaen gawked at her. “With what? He sounds like he’s being drawn and quartered!”
Cinnia cringed as the screams reached a crescendo before falling off to keening moans.
Horror wracked Louvaen with shudders hard enough to make her teeth clack together. “What in the name of hell is going on, Cinnia? No man makes noises like that.”
“Those who are tortured do.”
Both women jumped at the new voice. Louvaen stumbled back against her chair, tipping it over so that it hit the rushes and stirred up a small cloud of dust. A man emerged from behind the screens separating the kitchen from the hall. Short, compact and dressed in robes of faded azure shot with silver and embroidered with arcane symbols in black thread. White tufts of hair stuck from his head like the bristles of a frightened hedgehog. He peered at her and Cinnia with eyes made unnaturally large by the spectacles perched on his nose. That nose twitched—along with his pointed beard—as if he smelled something new.
“Ambrose. I’m glad you’re here.” Cinnia rushed to him and curtsied.
“The magician,” Louvaen said flatly.
“The magician,” he agreed and held out a bejeweled hand.
Unsure if he expected her to kiss one of his rings—for which he’d stand there waiting until he rotted—Louvaen took his fingers in a hesitant grasp. He brushed dry lips across her knuckles and straightened. “Mistress Duenda. Your sister and Sir Gavin have regaled us with tales of you and your father.”
“I’ll bet they have,” she murmured. She suspected Gavin’s commentary had been less than complimentary.
He released her hand, the thin smile curving his mouth indicating he’d heard her remark. “Your horse has been stabled for the night and a room made ready for you.”
Louvaen blinked. What strange madness gripped this place that no one—not even her sister who’d been known to weep over a crushed spider—seemed bothered by the horrendous sounds emanating from the castle depths? She recalled Ambrose’s first greeting. “Who is torturing Lord de Sauveterre? And where is his son?”
“He’s sick as well and in his room.” Cinnia gave her a weak smile.
“Is that so? Someone’s tearing his arms off too?”
Cinnia gestured to Ambrose, begging silently for his help. The sorcerer folded his hands in front of him and eyed Louvaen as if she were an interesting, if not particularly bright child. Louvaen suddenly understood why Cinnia snarled at her sometimes for what seemed like no reason. “Ketach Tor, mistress, lies in the center of a pool of wild magic. Sometimes the magic is weak, other times powerful—in flux. We call the strong periods high tide. Most of us suffer no ill effects from the flux. The most I deal with are potions reacting badly or spells turned backwards. The master and his son, however, are sickened by it. Gavin is bedridden with fever. His father suffers the worst.”
“Is there nothing you can do to relieve his suffering?” Louvaen wasn’t one to cry over a crushed spider, but the idea of a man repeatedly broken on such a brutal wheel made her sick to her soul. Gods, how she hated magic.
Ambrose shook his head. “No. Thedominusis strong and the flux temporary. He’ll get through it.”
“Are you sure? He sounds like he’s being hacked into several pieces right now.”
“I’m sure. This isn’t the first time he’s survived a flux. It won’t be his last.”
The lackadaisical attitude of de Sauveterre’s household toward their master’s distress flummoxed her. The noises he made almost had her running through this unknown place in an effort to search him out and do what she could to put him out of his misery.
