She lay back then, secure in her nest and delighted in her mischief. Kacha would finish this last business, he would come around the screens and see her there, and then, and then ...

Firelight flickered beyond the bedcurtains. The noises of the servants settled to soft rustlings. Medeoan smiled in anticipation of the culmination of her jest. She smelled something sharp, not quite smoke, but not incense either.

Then, she felt it - the chilling of the air, the prickling in her skin that traveled deep into her bones. Magic. Nearby, someone was performing a working of will. She had given no orders, she knew of nothing needful ...

Thoughts of danger shivered through Medeoan and she shot out of the bed.

"Kacha!" she cried as she dashed around the screens, and stopped in mid-stride.

She saw Kacha standing beside a brazier near his writing desk. He trembled hard, sweat pouring down his skin, his face in a wild grimace, torn between agony and ecstasy, and his hand, his withered right hand, thrust deep into the brazier's fire.

Shock froze Medeoan where she stood. As he gradually focused on Medeoan, a new emotion crept into his twisted visage - rage.

Medeoan couldn't think. Her vision blurred, refusing to see what was before her, she clutched at herself, seeking to still the sensation that told her against all reason that some strange magic was being worked here. Impossible, impossible. Kacha was no sorcerer. Kacha could not look at her with such hatred ...

Medeoan fled. She turned and ran back to her room, slamming the door behind herself. Ignoring the startled flurry of questions from her ladies, she dashed toward the bed, like a child seeking safety from the night's terrors. She clambered through the curtains and huddled on the mattress, her hand pressed across her mouth, but now it was to suppress her screams.

It cannot have been ... what did I see? Nothing, I cannot have ... But it was a working. I felt it ... I cannot ... it was not ... Fragments of thoughts, disjointed and purposeless, tumbled through her mind.

"Mistress ..." came a tremulous voice beyond the curtain.

"Leave me be," whispered Medeoan, wrapping her arms tightly around herself. "Leave me be."

"Yes, Mistress."

She closed her eyes. Kacha's hand was in the fire. She had seen it. She had felt the magic coursing through the ether. These things were true, but could not be true.

What happened? What happened?

"Beloved?"

Kacha. His voice sounded so tender, so like himself. How could he have been that creature who looked at her with such rage?

"Beloved, let me look upon you."

There was a rustle of cloth and the touch of flickering light upon her eyelids.

"Please, Medeoan. Look at me. Let me explain."

Slowly, Medeoan opened her eyes, and there stood Kacha, framed by the heavy curtains, a lamp in his good hand. His face was as soft, as tender as it ever was when he gazed at her.

Medeoan licked her lips. "What was that?" she whispered. "What were you doing in there?"

Gingerly, as if unsure of his welcome, Kacha sat on the edge of the bed. He pushed the curtain back so that he could set the lamp down on the bedside table before he spoke.

"What you saw, beloved, was what keeps my wounded hand," he held up his scarred and withered limb, "whole, if damaged, on my body."

"There was magic there," she said, her thoughts only reluctantly beginning to order themselves.

"The fire itself is magical. I must burn, each night, a series of sticks carved with runes, and give my hand over to the fire. This is the working of my father's sorcerer. If I did not do this, rot would have taken my hand long ago, and it would have been severed to save my life." He looked shamefacedly down at his shriveled fingers. "This is not a lovely thing, but it is better than no hand at all."

"Why did you not tell me of this?" Medeoan's voice was harsh.

"Because this treatment is painful, and I ... I do not always bear it as a man should. I did not want you to see me that way. I did not want you to worry." His voice dropped to a whisper. "I did not want you to pity me."

She took his withered hand, and it was rough and crabbed as it always was. She had become well used to the touch of that hand. It wasn't even warm from the fire. The scars that ringed the wrist were as white and crooked against his dark skin as they had been before.

"This magic does not heal you," she said.

He shook his head. "It cannot. The damage was too severe by the time they were able to free me."

She held his hand, willing herself to believe, willing herself to accept, but at the same time, her blood prickled with the sensation of shaping magic, of the working of will. It came from Kacha, and from Kacha's wounded hand, and she did not know why. If all was as he said, why would she feel this now that the spell was over and done? If he lied ... but how could she even think that Kacha might lie to her?

"I'm sorry if I startled you, beloved." Kacha's good hand tucked under her chin and lifted her face until she must look into Kacha's deep eyes. "I'm sorry I deceived you."

She kissed him, hard and suddenly, surprising herself at the force of her gesture. Kacha stiffened, but only for a bare instant. Then, he wrapped his arms tightly around her, answering her urgency with his own. She needed the urgency, needed the rush of it, to wipe away her doubts, the lingering feeling of a spell where there should not have been any, to restore the unclouded peace in her heart that had always occupied the place where Kacha dwelled.

Morning came. Medeoan opened her eyes to see Kacha sleeping beside her. She liked to watch him as he dreamed. She liked the peace in his face and his tousled hair and the gentle sound of his breathing. Their mornings together were never long, so, normally, she would watch him and then she would press herself against him, and he would sigh in his sleep and roll over to embrace her, and she would revel in that as well.

This morning, she did not move toward him. Her eyes felt dry and too hot, as if she had just finished crying. She had slept only fitfully, for she could not stop the thought tumbling through her head.

Why would any sorcerer impose such a healing, not even a healing, such a spell on a person? How could it be that this was the only way to keep Kacha's hand whole? She remembered too well the day Avanasy had called her from her studies and taken her out to the laundry sheds. Amidst the steam and the stench a woman lay on a pallet, screaming in her pain and writhing so her fellows were forced to hold her down. Her legs and both feet were a mass of burned and swollen flesh where a kettle had overturned and spilled a flood of boiling water over her. The stench from her roasted flesh sent Medeoan reeling.

Lord Sorcerer Iakush was already there. Avanasy ordered Medeoan to stand by the Mistress of the House, and the two men began to work. They had few tools at their disposal, and they had to work quickly, before the mere pain of her burns carried the woman away. Avanasy bound the woman's pain in a stone, the effort of it nearly making him swoon. Iakush plunged her legs into a basin of milk and herbs and then sprinkled more milk in a circle around her, weaving his spell as he made his circle. Perspiration sprang out on his forehead from the strength of his working and the heat of the room. Medeoan herself shivered from the waves of magic that rolled from the two men, cresting over the burned woman and crashing against Medeoan. No one else could feel anything. They could only stare and pray. Medeoan had been brought to watch and understand, and she tried to concentrate on the words Iakush spoke, on the touch of his working.

At last, at long last, a trembling Iakush knelt before the basin and drew out the woman's right leg. Even under the white film the milk left, Medeoan could see her flesh was whole and sound.

If an injury that should have killed a woman could be made whole by two Isavaltan sorcerers, how could the sorcerers of the Hastinapuran court, who were rumored to be among the most powerful and extensively learned in the world, fail to make her husband's wounded hand whole? Medeoan had never asked herself the question before, and now she hated herself for the asking. She wanted to accept what she had been told with all her strength and soul, and yet she could not.

Was there some neglect? Some lie, some secret, some incompetence on the part of the sorcerer? Could that be true? Medeoan stared up at the canopy. There had been a sorcerer at her grandmother's court, a dark and charismatic man. He had been given the care and treatment of her ailing great-uncle, and had, it was later found, been deliberately keeping him ill to prolong his appointment. He'd been beheaded in the courtyard.

Could this Hastinapuran sorcerer be doing something similar to Kacha? Was that what was happening? Was Kacha being deliberately kept in pain by a worthless servant? The thought clenched Medeoan's jaw in anger.

"Beloved?" murmured Kacha sleepily.

Medeoan turned toward her husband, and felt her love for him, unquestioning and unquestionable, well up in her. He was being wronged, but, unschooled in magic as he was, how could he know?

The fingers of his good hand brushed her cheek. "Your face was stern, beloved. What were you thinking of?"

"Your hand, my husband."

Kacha smoothed the coverlet over her stomach. "I wish you would not. What it is, it must remain. There is nothing to be done."

Medeoan pushed herself up on her elbows. "I'm not so certain, Kacha. I've seen miracles performed by Isavaltan sorcerers. It should not have been so impossible for a sorcerer to save your hand whole without this ... treatment you must undergo."

Kacha shook his head ruefully. "Everything that could be done, Yamuna did. He is my father's Agnidh, his bound-sorcerer. The life and protection of our family is his charge."

Medeoan tried to choose her words with care. "Kacha, is it possible that Yamuna ... did not do all that he might?"

"What do you mean, Medeoan?" Kacha frowned.

Carefully, Medeoan told him the story of her grandmother's court sorcerer. Kacha listened, his face remaining grave.

"That might be a thing that could happen in Isavalta," he said when she had finished. "But it is not possible in the court of the Pearl Throne. Yamuna is bound to my family, by oaths and ceremonies. He cannot act against us. It is impossible. He would call down the wrath of the Seven Mothers if he did." He tried to smile, and almost managed it. "I must ask you to accept what I myself had to accept years ago, beloved. My hand is ruined and its treatment is painful." He kissed her gently on the forehead. "Your concern speaks of love and I am glad of it, but try not to worry about it any more."

"I will do my best," promised Medeoan.

Her best, however, did not take her very far. The question gnawed at her through the breakfast with Lord Master Kagnimir and his men. It occupied her through the council meeting, and as she dictated her morning letters to her secretaries afterward and tried to concentrate as they read back to her a report from the legal advisors her father had assembled in an attempt to begin to codify the laws of the empire.

It stayed with her even after Kacha rode out to welcome the new convoy of ships arriving from Hastinapura, which carried the new ambassador from the Pearl Throne. Although Medeoan no longer had to watch him working with his weak and painful hand, the thought that he suffered repeatedly and needlessly would not leave her. But how could she make him believe that was so?

She would have to make sure he saw the proof with his own eyes. That would cause him pain, and she could not relish that thought, but the pain it would spare him would be much greater. After he saw how he had been wronged, he would allow her to bend her mind to the ways in which that wrong might be put right.

Medeoan left the papers and the laws and the blandly disapproving secretaries. Surrounded by her entourage, she returned to her private chamber. Through a series of audience chambers, sitting rooms and private studies, she came to a small, unadorned inner door. There, she took a silver key from the bundle she carried at her waist and opened it smoothly. The ladies took up lit candles in tall holders, placed them on either side of the door and retreated immediately. Here was the one room in the palace where Medeoan alone was permitted to walk. This room held the Portrait of Worlds.

The Portrait of Worlds was no mere carving or daubing of paint on silk or canvas. It was a working clockwork model of all the worlds, mortal and immortal. Made of bronze, silver, copper, and gems, it was a conglomeration of delicate spheres formed of wires and jewels, each turning on its silver spindle and each swinging in its separate stately orbit, all part of a great dance, its steps regulated by the fantastic clockwork that had taken a century to execute.

Unbidden, Medeoan's mind unleashed a flood of memories, all of them filled with Avanasy. Avanasy's loving voice as he described the Portrait, making her learn the names of its parts, their functions, and the history of this immense and complex tool. Hours of study at Avanasy's side over the books written by the court sorcerers of the Portrait's various uses, and their discoveries concerning its nature and the further nature of the visions it might evoke and the barriers it might be used to bypass or uncover. Yet more hours of his patient, cautious tutelage so that she might work well and familiarly with the precious object Father had placed in her guardianship.

Now, as Medeoan stood before the Portrait, watching its intricate dance, she forced herself to consider, dispassionately, as Avanasy had always urged, the nature of her will, and how it might best be shaped. The sharpest knife was useless in a clumsy hand, he had always said.

Damn the man for all his words, for her being unable to set them aside no matter how hard she tried. Damn him for not staying beside her, especially now when she needed him.

Medeoan took a deep breath and pushed her anger aside. She must think now, and not waste her energies with useless curses or regret.

She would need something of Kacha's. That much was simple enough. She wore his ring on her hand. She would need a mirror in which to see the vision she hoped to call up. She would need something to represent Hastinapura. Ideally, it should represent the Pearl Throne itself, as that palace was where the wrong had been inflicted. She would also need something to stand for the wound that was made and something to bind all these parts into a whole.

Tightening her jaw, Medeoan set to work.

In less than an hour, Medeoan stood again before the Portrait of Worlds. At its base she had laid out a scarf of precious scarlet cloth from Hastinapura, its weave so fine the scarf was translucent. On the cloth she had laid a silver mirror, and at the quarter points of the mirror she had placed a pearl from one of her pendants, a china hand broken from an ancient childhood toy, a brass dish of blood from the slaughtering shed, and, last of all, slipped from her middle finger, Kacha's ring. Beside the mirror waited a small bag she had filled with fine earth from the gardens.

The worlds of the Portrait swung over the mirror, the brass, copper and jewels reflected in its depths. Medeoan closed her eyes, making herself breathe deeply and struggling to clear her mind. This was the true test of power, Avanasy had always said. It was one thing to perform a working that had been handed down the years, and carefully inscribed in books. It was quite another to meet the needs of the moment with only the materials on hand. There were those who never managed the strength or the discipline.

As ready as she could be, Medeoan opened her eyes. She shook a small pile of the black, damp-scented earth into her palm and began sprinkling it in a circle around her mirror.

"I stand before all the worlds," she said, drawing her magic from within and without. "I am rooted in earth, in blood, in flesh and love. My eyes are open and my heart is open to the turning of the worlds. This is my word and my word is firm. The turning worlds will show me how Kacha tya Achin Ejulinjapad was wounded by Yamuna dva Ikshu Chitranipad. This is my word and my word is firm. The turning worlds will show me how Kacha tya Achin Ejulinjapad was wounded by Yamuna dva Ikshu Chitranipad." She repeated the words again, and again, pouring her circle of earth through her fingers and pouring her working through her spirit, weaving it into the required shape with earth and breath and the dance of all the worlds in front of her. She stared into the silver mirror, and watched the worlds swing and dip, turn and turn again, rest, and turn, anti-clockwise, forward, backward, up when they should have been down, turn and turn, and turn ...

For a moment, shadows swirled in the silver mirror, then those shadows reached up to meet the turning worlds and draw them close. The vision swallowed all of Medeoan's senses, until the present world vanished and she was wholly and completely part of the past.

It was hot here, unbearably, oppressively hot. Medeoan struggled to breathe. It was as if she had suddenly been wrapped in a wet woolen blanket at the height of a summer's day. She stood with three men in a circular chamber, inlaid with ivory and decorated in the elaborate Hastinapuran fashion. Despite the heat, a fire burned brightly on a carved altar at the center of the chamber. The first man was wizened, skeletally thin and dressed only in a white robe. The second man was soft of face and body, but his dark eyes were harsh and hard. His hands shook slightly. He's afraid, Medeoan realized.

The third man was barely a man at all. It was Kacha, young and fierce and proud, just as he had been when he had first arrived in Isavalta.

No, not just. His face was unscarred, and his hands - Medeoan swallowed against some emotion she could not yet name - his hands were perfect; the strong, unmarked hands of a prince.

The heat had hidden it from her at first, but now that she became more accustomed to it, she could feel that the room throbbed with magic. This was no mere prickling of some random spell. It thrummed through Medeoan's blood, making her stagger. She had never felt so much power. She would have thought a dozen sorcerers could not draw so much through themselves, and there was only one such here, and he held a black knife in his skinny hand.

"Are you ready, my prince?" he asked. His voice was soft but strong, like the first wind that hints at a storm.

Kacha squared his shoulders. Medeoan's heart melted to see him so strong, so proud, but at the same time fear chilled her. What was happening here, in this room as filled with magic as it was filled with air?

Kacha lifted his right hand and laid it on the altar. The sorcerer, whom Medeoan was sure must be Yamuna, laid his own right hand beside Kacha's.

"Hold your son, my lord," said Yamuna.

The second man, who must have been Chandra, Kacha's father, stepped hesitantly forward. He took his son's shoulders in his hands, but even Medeoan could see he gripped without strength. He had gone pale, and the perspiration that stood out on his forehead did not come entirely from the heat.

Yamuna raised the black knife, and he spoke again. This time the words were in some mellifluous tongue that Medeoan could not understand. She could, however, understand their effect full well. The magic that pressed so hard against her senses flared like the flames on the altar, brightening, intensifying, becoming so impossibly strong that Medeoan felt certain the stone walls must burst because they could not contain it all.

The knife came down.

Yamuna did not scream. He did not even seem to flinch, not at the torrent of blood, not at the severed hand that had been his own lying curled and spasming like a dying insect on the altar.

Yamuna raised the knife again. Kacha lifted his chin.

Medeoan screamed, a high, hysterical, unbelieving scream, torn from her throat without thought of stopping. The shrill, wordless noise shattered her working, dropping the present and true world around her like a shroud.

"Mistress?" called a quavering voice. "Mistress? Are you well?"

Medeoan's breath left her and she could scream no more. Her eyes opened of their own accord and she gasped for more air. She had fallen to her knees, she realized, and she now groveled at the base of the Portrait like some serf before their icon. The voice had been Chekhania, who could not enter this room without permission, and who must stand and fret outside.

"Mistress?"

Medeoan could not answer. She could not even pick herself up. She could only remain as she was, huddled on the floor, tears streaming down at the memory of what she had just seen.

But what had she seen? She didn't know. Not clearly. She had some vague intuitions, but she did not know. Could there be some benign explanation? Some reason, some oath extracted by his father that kept Kacha from telling her the truth of what had happened to his hand.

His father, Chandra, who had trembled during the working, as his son had not. Medeoan hid her face in her hands. Blood, power and blood. The vision had been so filled with both. There had to be some explanation. There had to be some way this came out right.

"Mistress? Please! ..."

She had to get up. She had to pull herself together and to think, to think of the way that made what she had seen come out right. But she could not. Her strength was gone, drained by her working and by what she had seen.

"Help me," she croaked. "Chekhania. Help me."

The waiting lady rushed into the Portrait room and lifted Medeoan to her feet. Medeoan had to put her hand on Checkhania's shoulder to steady herself. She had no strength in her legs at all.

"My bed," she whispered. "Get me to my bed."

"Yes, mistress." The lady's voice was breathy with her concern. "Shall I send for a surgeon, your sorcerer ...?"

Medeoan shook her head violently. "Just get me to my bed."

Chekhania supported her from the room to where Vladka waited. Together, they laid Medeoan on her bed. They loosened her laces and brought a cloth for her head. Medeoan waved them away.

"Let me sleep," she murmured. "Just let me sleep."

Unable to keep her eyes open a moment longer, Medeoan encased herself in a private darkness. She did not want to see her ladies, or her chamber, or anything but the answer she needed to understand what Kacha had done.