Sister of the Dead - By Barb Hendee & J. C. Hendee Page 0,76

chin beard and scant mustache below prominent cheekbones and a bony shelf of brow.

Leesil's throat closed up at the sight of Lord Progae's hazel eyes. He had never forgotten his first target.

"It never seems to stop, does it?" Progae shook his head with a sigh, neither angry nor sad, nor even surprised as he looked down at Leesil's hands. "The blood, I mean. "

Leesil barely found his voice. "I had no—"

"Choice?" Progae supplied. "I understand. You followed orders, and undoubtedly were in no position to disobey

None of us under Darmouth's sway ever were. But I wonder about them. " He looked down at the ground. "Was this necessary? Did you have to let this happen?"

Leesil stepped around Progae, keeping a careful distance from the man.

He stood on the lip of a shallow and wide depression in the earth, ringed about by a handful of trees. There lay three curled bodies, a woman with her arms wrapped about two girl children.

There was little flesh left on them, their skin pulled tight over bone in starvation's last day before death. The children's eyes were closed, but not the woman's. The rag she'd wrapped around her head didn't hide her thinned hair.

Leesil had slid a stiletto into Progae's skull while he was alone in bed.

His wife and daughters were turned into the streets. The eldest was taken as an additional mistress by a lord who was loyal to Lord Darmouth. There had been no such half-salvation for the wife and the two younger daughters. As the family of a traitor to Darmouth, they'd found no noble or commoner who'd risk taking them in. Leesil never found them and heard only later that they'd starved to death in an alley.

"Couldn't you have done something?" Progae asked. "It's not as if they tried to usurp Darmouth. "

Leesil still felt blood on his hands and wiped them on his gray vestment, but it continued to run between his fingers. He backstepped until Progae faded from his elven night sight.

Another voice carried through the forest. "We have a tenuous position here, Le"shil. "

High and lilting, it was touched with a strange accent he hadn't heard in many years. Not unlike the voice of Sgaile, used to the Elvish tongue and not wholly comfortable with a human language.

"Mother?" Leesil whispered.

"You are anmaglahk" came his mother's voice through the night forest.

It was a quiet and hollow statement of fact with no pride in it. She had said this to him long ago... not long before he'd taken Progae's life.

He spun about, searching for the voice. There was movement in the trees, but no more than shadowed silhouettes. Lord Darmouth's first mistress, Damilia, who'd conspired with Progae, stepped forward into his sight. She wore a deep green gown and ermine wrap, and a stray lock of auburn hair hung across her left eye. Her neck was deeply bruised around the welt left by a garrote wire. Leesil drew back from her.

"Leesil!" A woman's voice called again.

"Nein'a?" he shouted. "Mother, where are you?"

Among the trees, more figures closed in, stepping out into his way as he tried to evade them.

Latatz, Progae's sergeant at arms, bleeding from a double wound to the heart. The blacksmith of Koyva, his throat cut. Lady Kersten Petzka, wrapped only in her towel, her skin sallow from a deadly taint in her bath. They had all committed horrendous acts in service to Lord Darmouth or in their schemes against him. Or both.

But not Josiah.

The little old minister with his white hair and mirthful violet eyes stepped from the shadows, mouth spread by a swelled and blackened tongue. He'd never once raised hand or word against Darmouth. With no suspicion, the old man took in a young half-elf to train in a scribe's skills. Leesil had betrayed him to a hangman's noose because of Darmouth's paranoia.

Leesil raised bloodied hands to shield his eyes and fled.

Farther out in the forest, he caught glimpses of one lone shadow as it lunged through the trees like an animal on the hunt.

"Here. I am here, " his mother called out through the night.

"Mother?" Leesil called back.

He could find her if he moved quickly, but a second voice called from behind him. "Wait for me! I am coming for you!"

Leesil glanced back. The hunting shadow raced after him. He glimpsed a pale face before the figure seemed to dive out of sight, into the brush.

"Magiere?" he whispered, not wanting to rouse the shadows of the dead once again. "She's here.... My mother is