Erwillian watched with his heart in his mouth as the Lady took the silver cask from him, as she had taken another cask, so many years ago, from a trader who had brought her the most precious thing he could find. Her expression was the same now as then, the lust in her eyes darkening them to a lustrous black, and not for the first time he wished he was not the Royal Hunter. He could have been nothing, nothing but a plaything for women like her. He had black curls that sat neat and shimmering on his collar, and skin smooth and olive. Large eyes like dark almonds dominated his face, full of life and intelligence. An aquiline nose took the edge off his girlishness, made him handsome instead of pretty, and a smattering of dark stubble along his delicate jaw gave him a rakish look. His limbs were sleek, his belly flat, and his nipples pointed and brown in a smooth chest. Even as a slave he'd been indulged because of his looks, and once freed, on the whim of a love-struck noblewoman, he rose quickly in the Jailli Queen's palace to become Royal Hunter, because he had more than looks going for him.

I should have gone to Karon, he thought miserably. She will see right through my ruse. She will not believe...

Elisabeta had flipped open the cask's lid and recoiled in disgust, shielding her nose from the stench within with her silk sleeve. He held his breath.

'Why...Erwillian,' she choked on his name as its utterance forced her to take a breath, inhaling the reek of the decaying pig's heart within. 'This is...truly...hers?'

'Yes, my Queen.'

He lies, she is thinking, he lies!

'Very well. I didn't expect you to actually do it. I thought, that since all men's eyes follow her like moonstruck calves, that you would be the same. Did you take your pleasure of her, before the knife?'

The question caught him off guard, and shocked him, inexplicably, to the core. 'No, my Queen! It..I...'

'Oh, Erwillian!' She laughed gaily and set the casket aside, its lid firmly back in place. She shifted on her bed, tucked her legs under her and hid them in the generous folds of her silken skirts. Erwillian swallowed. The Lady's glance flickered to his groin, then to her great Mirror, hanging like judge and jury and executioner above his head. 'So, now I am the fairest in the land, once again, due to your loyalty and your devotion to me,' she said. Her lashes lowered, and her glance stole upward through them. 'One way to find out for sure, though, Erwillian, isn't there?'

Nononono! No, she couldn't, please, please...outwardly, he stiffened his spine. 'You are, and have always been, to me, the fairest,' he said stoically, as the shadows crept in and took hold of his sinking heart.

She said nothing, only shot him a stare so full of iron and ice that he felt it like a blow to his belly. 'We shall see, Erwillian.'

But even as he made again his assertion that she was the most beautiful woman to ever walk the earth, he knew the Mirror would give another answer, and with it, seal his fate. He never felt the executioner's axe fall on his neck, severing sinew from bone in a spatter of bright blood. The darkness took him the moment she asked that fateful question, her voice ringing like a funeral bell around her marble chamber.

'Mirror, mirror, on the wall, who is the fairest of them all?'


Alexander woke wrapped in sheets soaked in his own sweat, gone cold with the wind that howled through the trees and gusted into his sleeping chamber. The dream, if it had been that and not a vision, still stalked the halls of his mind like a fading shadow, and if it had unnerved him before, now it only puzzled him. He'd been standing on a beach where the wind blew warm, but no waves moved, no sound broke the silence. To his right was a house, a house of stone and steel, and he knew he'd come from there though he had no recollection of ever having been anywhere but the beach. Inside was a secret, knowledge of something he'd forgotten and knew he should not have. Had he not woken, he could have learned what it was. Perhaps. It touched the edges of his mind, probed at the closed places, and he tried to grasp it but it slinked off into the night, sniggering at his stupidity and arrogance that wouldn't let it in.

He wiped sleep from his eyes and threw off the sheets, stepping naked onto the cold floor. Snores came from another chamber, and he knew them for Flavian's. Russi sat, talking in hushed tones with Taki and Felix, wrapped in his cloak near the cave entrance, supposedly on watch but having eyes for nothing and no-one but the lithe Karoni girl next to him.

Alexander approached them, hanging back in the shadows, though he let a faint glow come to his head. Where his cloak was, he didn't know, since he'd gone to bed drunk and incoherent and could not remember how he got there.

'Three on watch? What's up?'

'Something out there,' Taki whispered. Her slanted eyes were, in the gloom, nothing but hollow sockets. Alexander had the unnerving sensation he was looking at a skull.

He crouched near them, no longer mindful of his nudity, and let the glow fade. 'Should I wonder why you're not out there shadowing it? Is it a who, or a what?'

Outside, there was a rustle of undergrowth, and the wind came in again with an agonising howl. Alexander sucked in his breath and flung out the wards. Tendrils of burning shadow snaked along the ground and wound their way up trees, like dark vines of power. Not all fire burns bright, he reminded himself. Not all fire burns at all.

Beside him, Taki giggled. 'Put some clothes on,' she hissed. He cursed. He'd forgotten what such black flame could do to him; the thrill of summoning something that Carellius had always forbidden rushed into his blood and set it boiling. It was pleasure like no other. With an effort, he took a deep breath and tried to dispel his arousal.

Felix reached out and placed a hand on his arm. A fierce, icy chill jolted him back into the present, and turned his fire to dampened embers.

He smiled his thanks at Felix. 'One day, I'll learn to control that,' he promised.

'You should have seen me the day I learned what ice could do to me,' Felix replied. 'Or rather, when I learned what desire could do to the ice inside me. I shattered a tray of glasses the first time, my bedroom windows the second.'

'I do not want to know!' Alexander hugged his knees to his chest. 'It's still out there, whatever it is. I don't know about you, but I don't think waiting until morning to find out what it is...'

'Sh!' Russi put a finger to his lips, half-risen from his seated position. He waved the others back silently, as they too became alert and made to rise. Go back inside, he mouthed at them. Alexander sidled off into the cave and fetched his leggings, boots and tunic. Time to go out and see what it was that had found the path to the Eyrie caverns.