Queen of the Darkness

placed on it. The child had tried to justify being sent to that horror, Briarwood. But the child was no longer a child, and the agony of having to face a bitter truth was ripping her apart.
    He also realized that, faced with this emotional battering, she was now clinging to the one solid wall of her childhood: Saetan's love and acceptance.
    Well, he could give her another wall to cling to. He opened his arms enough to invite but not enough to demand. "Come here," he said softly. "Come to me."
    It broke his heart the way she crept toward him without looking at him, the way her body was braced for rejection.
    His arms closed around her, comforting and protecting.
    "She was a good Queen, wasn't she?" Jaenelle asked in a pleading voice a few minutes later.
    Daemon felt a stab of pain. At another time, the lie would have been easy enough to say, but not tonight. Knowing he was going to rip away her last justification for Alexandra's behavior, he gave her the truth as gently as he could. "Compared to the other Queens in Terreille, she was a good Queen. Compared to any of the Queens I've met since I've been in Kaeleer... No, sweetheart, she was not a good Queen."
    Pain flowed with the tears as Jaenelle finally gave up the people she had once tried to love.
    He held her, saying nothing. Just held her while he let all of his love surround her.
    The door opened quietly. Ladvarian walked in, followed by Kaelas.
    Daemon watched them, and wondered if they had decided on their own to defy the command for solitude or if they had equated his presence with permission to enter.
    After a minute, the tip of Ladvarian's tail waved once. *We will come back later.*
    They left as quietly as they had come.
----
    Chapter Eight
    1 / Kaeleer
    Lord Magstrom nervously wandered around the room where the records from the service fair were stored. He'd only been home a couple of days and was still catching up on the official business of his own village. But Lord Jorval had urgently requested him to return to Little Terreille's capital to discuss something of the "utmost importance."
    He'd spent several days with his eldest granddaughter and her husband—days that had been filled with excitement and apprehension instead of the rest he so badly needed. His granddaughter was pregnant with her first child, and, though delighted, she was also quite ill. So he'd spent most of his time reassuring her husband that his granddaughter wouldn't divorce a man she loved just because she couldn't keep her breakfast down for a few weeks.
    He shouldn't have said "a few weeks." The younger man had looked ready to faint when he'd said that.
    He had written a hurried letter to the High Lord about the discrepancies he had found in the service fair records but then had hesitated over sending it, wondering if his own exhaustion had made something sinister out of what was really just sloppy clerical work.
    No matter. As soon as he was home again, he would write a more thoughtful, carefully worded letter, one that expressed concern rather than alarm.
    He had just reached this decision when the door swung open and Lord Jorval entered the room.
    "I'm glad you came, Magstrom," Jorval said a little breathlessly. "I wasn't sure who else I could trust. But anyone who's worked with you knows you couldn't be involved in this."
    "And just what is 'this'?" Magstrom asked cautiously.
    Jorval went to the shelves holding the records and pulled out a thick folder.
    Magstrom's stomach tightened. It was the Hayllian folder—the same one he had examined before his hasty departure from Goth.
    Jorval's hands trembled as he leafed through the papers, then put several on the large table. "Look. There are discrepancies in these lists." Hurrying to the shelves, he pulled out several folders and dumped them on the table. "And not only in the Hayllian lists. At first I thought it was a clerical error, but..." Taking a sheet of paper from one of the folders, he pointed. "Do you remember this man? He was most unsuitable to immigrate to Kaeleer. Most unsuitable."
    "I remember him," Magstrom said faintly. A brute of a man whose psychic scent had made his skin crawl. "He was accepted into a court?"
    "Yes," Jorval said grimly. "This one."
    Magstrom squinted at the scrawled writing. The Queen's name and the territory she ruled were almost illegible. The only thing he could definitely make out was that the territory was in Little Terreille. "Who is this... Hektek?"
    "I don't know. There is no Queen named