HM02 House of Moons by K.D. Wentworth Page B

panic, Haemas saw the seneschal, Pascar, waiting for her before the dining room. He glanced pointedly at the door, his old chierra face disapproving. Late again, she thought, and then knew with an icy certainty when and where she was.
    Somewhere in the back of her mind, she knew she didn’t have to do this anymore, didn’t have to repeat this endless pattern of guilt and shame. She started to turn away, but Pascar opened the doors for her, revealing the long table set only for four.
    Her stepmother, Alyssa Alimn Senn, and her cousin, Jarid Tal Ketral, looked up from their plates with amused eyes.
    But Jarid was dead. He had died at Haemas’s feet after trying one last time to kill her over twelve years ago.
    Seeming to hear her thoughts, he ran a careless hand back over the bright-gold of his hair and laughed. “Once a skivit, always a skivit, isn’t that right, Cousin?”
    She flinched at the hated nickname. She didn’t deserve that anymore; she was no longer the same timid, frightened girl. She watched as he poured dark-red tchallit wine into green crystal goblets. Her hand reached for the goblet even as she remembered how Jarid had drugged it on that long-ago night.
    She looked up at the self-satisfied smirk on Jarid’s suddenly indistinct face, blinked, and then, like wind-blown sand, his features shifted. It wasn’t Jarid at all—it was Diren Chee. Her hand jerked away from the goblet as if it had burned her.
    “You never learn, do you?” Chee smiled at her with predatory sharp white teeth. “I find it quite disappointing that after all this time you’re still so stupid.”
    Laughter began then, manic laughter echoing off the walls until it deafened her. The woman sitting beside Diren Chee took her hand away from her mouth and revealed the thin-featured face of Axia Chee. The Chee woman threw back her head and laughed louder and louder until Haemas thought she would scream.
    “Go ahead.” Diren Chee nodded at her. “No one will hear you, of course.”
    Haemas bolted up, feeling as if she were drowning in the shrieking, mirthless laughter, as if she would die if she didn’t get away that very second—
    “Die?” Diren Chee reached into his pocket. “I suppose we can arrange that.” He held his open hand out. “If you insist.” A glowing green crystal lay in his palm, buzzing with deadly energy.
    She backed away, knocking over a chair. It clattered on the floor and blocked her way.
    “If you insist.” Chee leaned across the table. “If you—”
    “No!” Haemas sat bolt upright on the narrow cot in the Chee’ayn tower and threw off the worn blanket. Breath rasped in her chest as if she had run halfway across the windswept Highlands. She glanced around in a panic, but no one was there. The only door was closed and the sparse fire had burned down to sullen red-gray coals.
    Jarid was dead; she knew that, yet somehow it seemed he was with her tonight in this terrible place, laughing as she tried not to lose everything she had struggled to build since his death. She had been his victim during the hard bitter years of her childhood, the object of his envy over her place as Heir to Tal’ayn, and the instrument of his revenge against her father. But no more!
    She had cast all that away when she had finally broken the false memory Jarid had inflicted upon her. Then she had renounced her inheritance, seeking instead to found a Shael’donn for Kashi daughters where they could come and freely learn the mindarts and understand that they had choices in life that went beyond marriage and childbearing. She was not going to be anyone’s victim again, not now or in the future.
    There had to be a way out of this. Rising from the cot, she found a chipped basin in the far corner of the room and dashed tepid water over her hot face.
    Diren Chee would not get away with this. No one was ever going to use her again.

DIREN GAZED DOWN from the third-floor windows at the pine grove and mused that, in this one