The witches had arrived on the specified night, and they had learned the secrets and the horrors of Briarwood. Their guide, a demon-dead girl named Rose, showed no mercy as she introduced them to the ghosts. One Priestess found her cousin, who had disappeared when they were children, bricked up inside a wall. A Province Queen recognized what was left of a friend’s daughter.

They saw the gaming rooms. They saw the cubicles that contained the narrow beds. They saw the vegetable garden and the girl with one leg.

Numbed by what they saw, they followed Rose, who smiled at them and told them in precise detail how and why each child had died. She told them about the other demon-dead children who had gone to the Dark Realm to live with the rest of the cildru dyathe. She recited the list of Briarwood’s “uncles,” the men who had supported and used that twisted carnal playground. And she recited a list of broken witches from aristo families who had been “cured” of their emotional instability-and stripped of their inner power-and then returned home.

One of the men Rose had named was Robert Benedict, Leland’s former husband and an important member of the male council-a council already decimated by that mysterious illness.

When a Healer in the group had asked about the illness, Rose had smiled again, and said, “Briarwood is the pretty poison. There is no cure for Briarwood.”

Alexandra clutched her shawl and kept shivering.

The rage that had swept through Chaillot had torn it apart. Beldon Mor became a battleground. The members of the male council who had not yet died from the illness were viciously executed. After several men from aristo families died of poison, many others fled to inns or one of their clubs because they were terrified to eat or drink anything that might have passed through the hands of the women in their families.