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taken to your bed.  Are you willing to lie?”
    “For now yes.”
    Ballard clapped a hand on his son’s broad shoulder.  “Take what you need from the treasury.  Once the flux is in ebb tide, you can return to Monteblanco.  If you love this Cinnia as much as you say, be ready to crawl and beg Hallis’s forgiveness for taking his daughter.  A chest of gold might sweeten his mood but don’t assume so.  Were I her sire, I’d break both your legs.”
    “Were Mercer Hallis like you, Cinnia would never be caught in this trap.”  Gavin embraced him, pounding his back hard enough to make Ballard’s teeth rattle.  “Thank you, Father.”  He bowed.  “I take my leave of you.”  He grinned and took off for the kitchen.
    Ballard and Ambrose watched him leave.  The sorcerer addressed Ballard without turning.  “Did you notice his eyes?  They weren’t like that at the last flux.”
    Ballard’s gut clenched.  He’d hoped it had been a trick of the firelight or his own imagination suddenly turned fanciful, but Ambrose had noted it as well.  Gavin’s green eyes glinted yellow in just the right light.
    Ballard sighed.  “I’m like a bucket filled to the brim.  The curse is bleeding over.  Once it consumes me, it will take him.  If that happens, Ambrose...”
    “It won’t,” Ambrose swore in a low voice.  “This girl may be the key.  He just has to make her fall in love with him.”
    “Then pray to your gods Gavin is more charming than I am and wins her soon.”  He displayed one of his hands with its black claws and large knuckles.  Spirals of dark blood coursed just below the corpse-white skin as if writing spells in his veins.  “We’re running out of time.”

CHAPTER THREE
     

     
    Louvaen pinched the corner of Cinnia’s letter between two frozen fingers as if it were a wild thing with snapping jaws and a nasty bite.  The words scrawled on the parchment were unreadable symbols in the growing twilight.  She knew each one by heart, had memorized every sentence during her miserable trip to this equally miserable fortress.  The letter fluttered in the gusts of snow-laden wind and glowed with the magic mixed into the ink.
    She despised magic.  The purview of every charlatan, snake oil brewer, and bride-stealing nobleman, it did nothing but cause trouble and create misery.  Her own mother had wielded her gift with some skill, or so her father liked to brag.  Gullveig Hallis would have been right at home in this gods-forsaken landscape where the air shimmered blue and hung thick with the stench of sorcery.  Louvaen wanted no part of it.  She opened her hand and watched the wind snatch the letter away, sending it fluttering and spinning like a frantic bird caught in a whirlwind.  Curtains of falling snow soon obscured it as it floated across the gorge separating her from the ominous hulk perched on a spike of jagged rock.
    Massive, dark with age and the soot of old fires, the fortress gripped the mount with buttressed claws built of stone.  Pieces of the curtain wall were gouged from the west corner, leaving the shell of a tower teetering dangerously high above her.  Louvaen fancied she heard it creak and rumble in the hard wind howling up from the abyss.  A drawbridge stood flush against the citadel’s entry gate, anchored by chains strong as those that anchored ships.  This was no gentleman’s estate, with manicured grounds and forests tamed to formal landscapes crisscrossed by level gravel roads.  Whatever the de Sauveterres’ wealth—or lack thereof—might be, the family had chosen not to spend coin on a residence to impress the neighbors.  This one fended off foes and friends alike with its lattice-barred gate, murder holes and arrow slits.  Louvaen shuddered as much from dread as from the bitter cold cutting through her layers of wool.  “Gods’ knickers, Cinnia,” she muttered into her muffler.  “What have you gotten yourself into?”
    The sky’s bleak gray