Rape, her mind said. Betrayal, greed, lust, hypocrisy... rape.

But he had laid spells on her that kept her asleep. She would not be free of him, she thought, until he was dead.

She woke and found that she had her knife in her hand. She lay in the corner of the bishop's courtyard, fire between her and where a voice that might have been human, half a mile or more away, was blubbering and shrieking in agony, as something made leisurely prey of its owner.

Good, she thought, calm and strangly clear. He's distracted.

Why did she feel that the matter had been arranged?

The blanket slid from her as she rose to hands and knees, knife tucked against her side. In her bones, in her heart, with the same awareness by which she knew the hapless ghoul was being killed for her benefit, she also knew herself to be invisible to the stretched-out fibers of Ingold's senses, invisible to his magic. If she kept low, practiced those rites of silence the Guards had taught, she could sever his spine as easily as she'd severed that of the thing that had torn open her face.

His fault, too, she thought bitterly, surveying the thin fringe of white hair beneath the close- fit lambskin cap. His doing. His summoning, if the truth be known.

I beautiful before...

She knew that wasn't true. Thin-faced, sharp-featured, with a great witchy cloud of black hair that never would do what she wanted of it, she had never been more than passsably pretty, a foil for the glamour of a mother and a sister whose goals had been as alien to her shcolarly pursuits as a politician's or a religious fanatic's might have been.

The awareness of the lie pulled her back-pulled her fully awake-and she looked down at the knife in her hand.

Jesus, she thought. Oh, Jesus...

''Ingold..."

He moved his head a little, but did not take his eyes from the dark, of the court. "Yes,

child?"

"I've had a dream," she said. "I want to kill you."