After Peto left, Mihael asked, "How long will you hate him, Ilsabet?"
"Someone has not forgotten the promise she made," she replied, then turned her back on him, laughing aloud as soon as the door closed behind him. Alone now, she began to finish her letter. On the edge of her vision she saw a shadow move through her room, but when she turned to find the source, nothing was there.
She opened her mouth to call for Greta, then cut off the sound. Children were afraid of the dark and the things that took their strength from darkness.
No! I will not be a silly child any longer, she wrote in her journal that night. I will make my heart and mind hard and fearless, cold as stone, cold as an avenger's heart and mind should be.
Nonetheless, she slept the night with a candle burning at her bedside.
SEVEN
The following evening Marishka sat brushing her long hair in front of a mirror. The color of new copper coins, it fell in soft waves that covered her shoulders. She looked beyond her reflection at the gowns hanging from hooks on the dressing room wall. Though the ones less frequently used grew dusty on the open hooks, they were safe from the mildew that invaded every piece of fabric or wood left in the closets of Nimbus Castle. These had once been her mother's dresses, given to her by her father on her sixteenth birthday. With the gift came a request that she wear one from time to time to remind him of his love.
Perhaps her mother and father were together now in the afterlife, but if so, what of Lady Lorena, who had also loved him? The gods must have ways of sorting these complications out, she thought, and put the matter from her mind, certain she was not clever enough to solve the matter herself.
She turned away from the mirror and went to finger the beautiful silks and taffetas, the gorgeous thin-spun woolen capes and shrugs and shawls, some trimmed with gold and precious gems, worth more than a Pirie merchant made in a year. She wondered if she could ever bear to wear the clothes again.