“It happened so quickly—like a bad dream. To see her again… to know her dead…” She sighed. “May the Mother pity him.”

Lute glanced at her sharply. “And yourself? I find you wholly mistress of your own soul and not sharing it with some heedless, teasing beauty?”

She laughed and tossed her hair back over her shoulders. “My own self and no other,” she said softly. “Poor Master Lute. But while we were together, I did—dream.” She glanced down, in a sort of maidenly shyness foreign to her usual manner. “I was never a free woman, you know. In the Circle, there is—duty. Some of Tael’s memories were—interesting. I shall have think on them more fully, as Sister Laurel would have said.”

“More fully,” Lute echoed and shook his head, vanishing all four counters. “Well, take some advice and stick to my sort of magic in the future. Less dangerous. More lucrative.”

Moonhawk laughed and pulled the pan from the fire. “Eggs, Master Lute?”

So ends the second tale of Lute and Moonhawk.

Moonphase

THE WOOD BENCH was cool beneath her bare buttocks, the stone cold under her bare toes. No heat came from the empty fireplace, nor light from the empty oil lamps and candelabra. Despite the season the barred windows high in the walls were open.

She needn’t see the walls, canted inward as they rose, to understand the meaning of the word prisoner, though it was a word unsaid by the Sisters and the Mother herself.

“You will be assigned more appropriate duties after you recant, Mendoza,” they’d told her, already stripping away the dignity of the name that had come to her unbidden the first time she’d bled.

Mendoza, they called her now. More properly, Priscilla Delacroix y Mendoza. And what of Moonhawk?