She took a small sip. A thought struggled somewhere, and finally she asked, "The...message?"

"As you ordered, I did send it, under the blue flag of messages and harmony. Lord Ehara doubtless did not feel such harmony when he received your words."

"Received?" Anna rasped.

"You have lain like one enchanted or dead for nearly a week. The message has surely been delivered, but there has been no time for a reply. We have forced water into you, but you are thin unto death." He extended a small fragment of bread. "You must eat."

Anna slowly chewed the bread, hard as it was with a dry mouth, then let Jecks hold the goblet again as she drank. "The dam...?"

"You have wrought a mighty sorcery," he admitted, offering another small fragment of bread. "The river has filled the gorge for three deks and slowed its flow for another five...And it has yet to creep halfway, nay not even a fourth part of the way, up those stones your sorcery laid."

"Is any . . . water going...past..."

"Beyond the dam are only sands and drying rocks. And more sand and dry rock. Before long, Lord Birfels worries that the waters will flood the fields near Emor."

Emor? Anna hadn't even heard of Emor.

"That is a small hamlet fifteen deks upstream of Abenfel." Jecks pressed another square of dark bread upon her.

"Be... awhile," mumbled Anna as she struggled with the bread. "Years. It's a deep gorge."

''Not as deep as before. The waters have covered the sands and the sh.o.r.es, and it is a lake of blue." He offered more bread.

Chewing the bread took effort, and her jaws moved as though they were made of lead. She swallowed and took another sip of wine.

Her eyes felt heavy, far too heavy, and she could no longer keep them open.

84.

PAMR, DEFALK.

"I can't believe what Deurn said you had back here," says the thin and wispy-bearded youth. "I just had to see."

"You'll see, Elcean," promises the young chandler. "It is rather remarkable." He closes the door to the small room, and the slow and rhythmic drumming enfolds them-thurummm... thurumm... thurummm...

thurumm...

"Oh..."

On the pedestal is an almost life-sized statue of a voluptuous brunette, with an impossibly slender waist and dark hair that fails against creamy skin like a gossamer cloak, just barely coverlng her b.r.e.a.s.t.s. The hair shimmers and shifts ever so slightly in the still air, yet the naked woman-or statue-does not move.

"Oh. . . Fa.r.s.enn . . .can I touch her?"

"That might not be a good idea," says the chandler. "At least, not until you listen to me. She won't go anywhere."

"I can look..."

Fa.r.s.enn slips into song, ba.s.s voice intertwining with the rhythm of the drum.

"Men of Pamr, heed no woman's s song, for Fa.r.s.enn will make you proud and strong..."

When the spell ends Fa.r.s.enn blinks, then squints before he resumes smiling. "You see? We men need to stand together these days, don't we?"

"'Course... like you say." Elcean continues to stare at the brunette. "Sure is pretty."

The drumbeat dies, and Fa.r.s.enn smiles conspiratorially. "Just don't tell any of the women...You know what I mean?"

Elcean flushes.

"It was good of you to come to see me." Fa.r.s.enn makes a vague gesture toward the door. Elcean follows the gesture, and the chandler follows him.

Once the door closes, the drummer rises and glances at the rough clay figure that stands on the crude wooden pedestal, a figure no more than a yard and a half tall. Then he wipes his steaming forehead, then ma.s.sages it. He also blinks as though he has difficulty seeing clearly.

85.

Anna looked at the empty tray on the writing table before her. Had she eaten all that? Every time she pushed her sorcery, she paid, and paid more, it seemed. That was another reason why she wanted to see if she could get Ehara to push the Sturinnese out.

"It won't happen...." she murmured to herself. All that would happen was that the Falche would fill up over the next few years, the Dumaran people would suffer, and she'd take the blame. The Sturinnese would stay put, and she and Jecks would have to decide whether a war in Dumar was worth it. And she would either have to rely on brute-force sorcery to devastate Dumar and prevent a worse mess later, or she could be reasonable, according to conventional lordly wisdom, and wait for a Sturinnese backed invasion or worse in a year or two. By then, Ebra would be in the middle of a civil war, or the war would be over and she'd have another growing enemy to the east while Konsstin would be bringing sorcerers and armies into Neserea to the west.

Yet... how could she live with herself if she didn't try something else? Even if it happened to be a long shot?

She snorted. Of course she could forget Dumar for a time. But then she would have to use force in Ebra to secure Defalk's eastern borders, and that would probably encourage the Sturinnese to attack southern Defalk from Dumar when she was weeks away in Ebra and could do nothing.

Outside was gray. That she could tell, but it wasn't raining, just hot and gray. Even in the thin shift that wasn't hers, she felt hot, and sweaty, and smelly. She wanted a bath, not a sponge bath, and not a bath in the lukewarm water Defalkans called hot. She wanted a hot and steaming bath, and she wasn't going to get it anytime soon. Not when even boiling water cooled on the long trip up from the kitchens and the mere thought of sorcery sent a screaming pain across her temples.

Still, she was better. She wasn't quite so gaunt, and she could eat, and take short walks, and Jecks didn't look at her as though she were about to die. Yet it seemed her recovery was taking longer than after other similar large spells.

Outside the window the finches twittered, and Anna smiled at the calls that were half song, half argument.

Her eyes flicked to the mirror on the wall-a mirror she could use just as a mirror, thanks to the reflecting pool. She wasn't sure she wanted to see her reflection, not yet, anyway.

Thrap!

"Yes?" she said warily.

Jecks peered in. "Lady Anna?"

"Come on in." After he entered, she gestured to the chair across the writing desk from her.

"You look better," Jecks offered as he seated himself.

"Not as though I'd die on the spot?" Anna reseated herself.

"You are surely in better health," he said with a smile.

"Because I'm back to my old snippy self?" She even felt like smiling in return.

"All were worried."

"You were upset because you don't see what this sorcery will accomplish besides flooding fields?"

"And killing Defalk's sole hope of prevailing against the Liedfuhr." He smiled. "I mean you, my lady."

"You don't worry about Sturinn?"

"We have no ports and need little of what is traded across the Western Sea."

"Forty ships in Dumar doesn't bother you?"

"The Liedfuhr has fifty thousand lancers, it is said." Jecks shrugged. "Forty ships carried a tenth of that number."

Anna forced a smile. Jecks was being logical, and she couldn't fight logic with logic. Her intuition told her he was wrong, that Sturinn posed a far greater danger than Mansuur. But how could she convince him? She took a slow breath.

"You fear Sturinn more than Mansuur." His words were even, not quite a question.

"Yes. I can't explain why or how, but Sturinn is a greater danger." Anna took a sip of the wine, a drier red that was far better than the honeyed stuff she'd swallowed when first recovering. Her legs felt stiff, and she pushed back the straight-backed chair and stood.

Why did she feel like an arthritic old woman? In the mirror, she looked like a worn-out twenty-year-old, but that wasn't the way she felt at the moment.

She needed to get stronger. That she felt, but it had been almost two weeks since the dam had been com- pleted, and she was still slow and tired. Each day she tried to walk farther, get more exercise, but she continued to feel drained.

Her feet took her to the window, and to the gray clouds piling in from the east.

'Sturinn may be a greater danger," ventured Jecks, "but Mansuur is closer."

Anna nodded. She couldn't argue with that, either. "We'll have to do something about Dumar or Ebra."

"None will gainsay your right to back one side in the conflict there," Jecks pointed out.

More d.a.m.ned politics. "I suppose not. We don't p.i.s.s off either the Sea-Priests or Konsstin, not openly."

She shook her head. Or worry the beloved lords of the Thirty-three. . . . Lord!

"You could go by way of Synope," Jecks offered placatingly.

"I could." Why did she feel so d.a.m.ned tired? She yawned. "I still think Dumar is the bigger problem."

'You still are tired."

"Yes," she admitted, reluctantly. Her eyes felt heavy. Just how long would it take for her to feel normal again?

He stood. ''I must go."

Anna walked toward the high bed. Her eyes were closed within moments of the clunk of the door.

86.

ESARIA, NESEREA.

The heavy, gilt-framed mirror in the hallway to the bedchamber swings away from the wall. A single low candle lights the corridor behind the barred door. On the other side of the door are two Mansuuran lancers.

After several, moments a cloaked figure slips from the opening made by the swiveled mirror and toward the archway leading to the bedchamber. In the bed a man lies, sleeping on his side, his closed eyes facing the archway. He does not move as the intruder enters the room.

The figure in deep brown, far less visible at night than black, steps up to the table by the bed, deftly takes the stoppered wine pitcher from the tray and replaces it with another.

As silently as he has come, the intruder eases his way back behind the mirror. The mirror swings back into place, and without even a click, seats itself so that it again appears built into the wall.

As he steps down the stairs to the narrow pa.s.sage set partly below floor level, Rabyn murmurs, "You will notice nothing, taste nothing, good Nubara. Not for a long, long time."

He pa.s.ses several other niches in the wall, each behind a mirror. He also must duck upon occasion when the pa.s.sageway' s ceiling lowers to accommodate windows in those rooms it borders. He turns two more corners and comes to the place where he entered.

There, at the top of the three narrow steps, he presses a lever, and another mirror swings out from the wall. Once he is inside his own rooms, he closes the mirror and carefully checks the boss on the left side, wiping it carefully with the fabric of the brown cloak.

With a smile, he walks to his dressing room, stopping in front of the three-yard-wide polished-wood wardrobe, and drawing wide the double doors. After he opens the hidden compartment at the back of the wardrobe and replaces the enveloping brown cloak, his eyes go to the miniature portrait on the long dressing table.

The dark-haired woman seems to smile at him, and he smiles back.

"Yes, you taught me well. As that lizard Nubara will discover."

87.

The sound of heavy raindrops on the walls of Abenfel echoed into the dim study in the late afternoon.

"How long is this rain going to last?" Anna asked, her eyes going to the closed shutters of the study. She felt almost trapped inside the dark-paneled room. The faint odor of wax and burned candlewicks made her nose twitch, even as she stifled another yawn. Would she ever stop feeling tired?