"Not Isis," the woman pleaded. "Anybody but my little girl. Take me," she insisted. "I can - I will do anything you want. Anything. Please? Take me!"

He shook his head in a vehement gesture, dark brown hair flying from side to side across his face. "No. She's perfect. I want her." He pointed one finger at her, a finger now bare of the jewels that had once adorned it.

The dark-haired child blinked her pale eyes at him.

"She's mine." He reached out to grip her white wrist. The brunette let out an anguished wail, and threw herself at him. A sharp smile flashed over his features as he realised he could teach his favourite lesson to the child immediately.

"Watch closely," he told the girl, before his attention returned to her mother.

For one moment, he let the woman's nails scrabble over his skin. In the next, he whipped out his knife. The third moment had the woman's lifeless body collapsing on top of him.

The young girl's face crumpled.

"Don't fret, my pretty. You're going to be Princess Kalasin."


I woke up sweating, finding my breath coming short and fast.

My eyes darted around the room. Satisfied that the figures had stayed in my nightmare, my breathing calmed. I clambered out of bed and gradually forgot all about the bad dream. That, I suppose, was my problem. The bad things were so easily forgotten and too easily forgiven.


It was gone midday when I first heard it.

I'm not a healer. I don't even have the Gift, it just looks as though I do. But I do know that having voices in your head is not a good sign. Well, not voices. Just a voice. But it was his voice.

I'm ready to kill them all.

Startled, I dropped my fork, and looked around for the speaker. Lianne, who was reluctantly seated next to me, frowned, disapproving of her elder sister's table manners. It was the first time she'd acknowledged my presence for days – she seemed to blame me both for Thom leaving and Liam's disappearance as well! Of course, I was responsible for both, but that didn't mean she had to blame me for them. She had no proof. "Kalasin, is something wrong?"

A blush stained my cheeks as I realised I was attracting attention. "Oh, nothing, nothing." I had imagined it, of course I had. The meal returned to normal. It was only Kalasin, being peculiar again.

During dessert, the whisper in my mind returned.

I'm coming for you. I have a plan.

"I have a plan," I repeated softly, earning many strange looks, but not much more than was usual. "Coming for..." My eyes widened. Me? It was him, him at last, but I didn't want him now, I wanted to be left alone. I wanted his voice out of my head.

I want you to begin tonight, he told me.

Tonight? I asked. Tonight was too soon, it was-

Tonight, he confirmed.


I was pale and sweating once more by the time the end of dinner came. Making the excuse that I needed to lie down, I went back to my room, and changed into a dress that the maker had decided 'showed off my feminine charms'. In other words, it was tight-fitting and low-cut. And perfect, although breathing may prove to be a problem. It wouldn't be as much a problem for me as it would be for King Jonathan, though. I slid my dagger into a hidden pocket.

"I'm ready for you, Father, dear. Are you ready for me?"


The small girl stumbled up the hill. Tears slid down her cheeks, mingling with crimson blood, and stung where they met open cuts.

That walk would stay in her mind for years to come, each slow, steady, painful step of it. Seven years, in fact, because at the end of them another change in her life would appear, it meant that all his promises for her would be fulfilled at last, and she would get what she deserved.

Nobody had recognised her at first. She remembered feeling like a small ghost wandering the halls as if she were dead, because nobody made eye-contact with her, or spoke to her. It was as if she wasn't there. But why should they remember her? She'd never met them, they'd never met her.

She had felt the weight of many disapproving gazes on her, but whenever she turned to look at the watchers, their eyes were always busy elsewhere. It was something that she had had time to get used to; very few people found it easy to talk to her without the scars marked carefully on her drawing their attention.

Eventually, her feet had led her to a large brown door. She had set her small hand on the handle…


That was where I stood, as an eighteen-year-old. Outside the library, ready to greet the man who thought he was my father, only on this occasion, it wasn't the first time that I was going to meet him, but the last.

Knock or not? I wondered, fiddling with my supposedly 'enchanting' sapphire-blue gown that, far from bringing out similar shades in my fascinating sapphire eyes, turned the mild blue into a wishy-washy colour. It seemed a silly thing to be worrying about right now.

"But that colour looked so good on you when you were young!" had been the astonished words of the equally astonished dressmaker, who had been amazingly astonished to return from a decade in Tyra, to find that Princess Kalasin was the promising swan who had turned into a duck. Obviously, it hadn't occurred to her that I wasn't who she thought. My reaction had been one of the ones that I am most proud of. I should have been a Player, the performance was that good. I had burst into tears, screaming about devilry, and how she was one of them, coming to take me away.

I hadn't seen her since. Perhaps Father had granted that prestigious position to another person. Father.

That brought my attention back to the present situation. I pushed open the door, and found him sitting exactly where I thought he would be, reading from a scroll.

"Father?"