contemporaries said, was one of the many signs that boded ill for the independence of the Scallon Isles. Bal could hardly imagine how Tercelle would come to need to throw herself on the mercy of an obscure physician-scholar, even one married to the archduke’s cousin. Or rather, he could hardly imagine any good reason for her to do so.
Years of training in courtesy prevailed. “Please”—he extended his arm toward the receiving room—“do sit down.”
She paused on the threshold, and in the reflections of her sonn he perceived the salon’s shabbiness, the best room in a house of impoverished minor nobility. He had another home, true, a fine home to suit the lady he had married, and even though it had been bought and paid for with her inheritance, not his, when she was there, he felt it home. When she was not, when she and the children went to one of her family’s estates, he returned here. And no, this house had not changed; if anything, it had become shabbier than when Tercelle knew it. She had made no secret of her disdain then, during her long flirtation with his brother. Bal wondered if Lysander had known how little chance his suit had had, even then. He wondered what he knew now.
She walked into the center of the room and turned with some small effort of balance. “Have you ever heard from Lysander?”
“No,” Balthasar said, suppressing his slight disturbance at having his thoughts echoed so deftly: Of course she would be thinking of Lysander, facing his brother. She was no mage.
She sonned him, a delicate lick of vibration. “Are you still angry with him?”
“Leaving,” Balthasar said, “was the best thing he could have done. For us, his family, and for you.”
“How harsh,” she said in her breathless lilt. “I never thought you would become so unforgiving a man. You were always so gentle. And you adored Lysander, as I did.”
True, he had, once. “Please, Tercelle, why have you come?”
There was a silence, and then a rustle of movement. “I need your help.” His sonn caught her as she shrugged the unhooked cloak from her shoulders and let it slide to the ground.
Somehow he was not entirely surprised to know that she was pregnant, though he was disconcerted by how large and low she was carrying. She must be very near her time.
But her fiancé had been gone over a year, harrying the Scallon pirates and conducting diplomatic forays into the neighboring island kingdoms to advance the dukedom of Mycene’s claim on the isles, their territory, and their exports of exotic fruit and spices.
“The child is not your intended’s,” he said, keeping all tone from his voice.
She scowled that he should say it. She reached back and lowered herself awkwardly into a chair he had not offered. “If he learns of this child, the best that will happen is that he and his family will repudiate me. The worst is that he would kill me.” She shifted her belly on her lap with a grimace. “I’d rather be dead than cast aside.”
“How is it,” Balthasar said, “that no one has told him?”
“When I knew I was with child I sought to lose it. I tried all the means I could discover. I even contrived a fall from a horse.” He was silent, remembering the aching devastation of Telmaine’s one miscarriage. He and Telmaine had walked around the house like souls in purgatory. “It didn’t work. But I had the excuse to go away, to live as an invalid until my time came.”
She pressed a fist against her abdomen, grimacing. “I . . . lay with him but four times. It was the last . . .” She could have given him the date, the hour, he knew. He felt compassion for her in her fond folly, despite his dislike of her and the danger in the situation for himself. Ferdenzil would surely believe she had sought the aid of her lover.
“He would tap on the door to give me warning, and then I would tap back and go into the next room and wait, and he would come in . . . Sometimes I wanted to lock the door; once I did and then I unlocked it again . . . I could not do otherwise. And it was in the day he came, always in the day.”
Bal frowned. Ballads and broadsheets told of Lightborn demon lovers, crossing the sunset to seduce Darkborn girls. The stories were absurd, since the Lightborn