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the servant’s entrance. A heartbeat later, primal instinct dropped her to the ground.
    A sharp thurrrr cut through the air where she’d just been standing.
    Something clattered to the ground well past her.
    Still working on reflex alone, Alyea rolled, fetching up behind one of the giant planters, and drew into a tight crouch, palms flat on the ground. Three more arrows clattered on the courtyard brick.
    An eerie silence descended.
    Alyea stared at the scattered arrows in disbelief; then her thoughts snapped into sharp, unemotional focus. Her mother, for all her faults, would never try to kill her own daughter: which meant someone else was in the Mansion.
    The gates seemed very far away, and across too much open ground. With a new, paranoid suspicion, Alyea wondered if the guards hadn’t given way and let her in a shade too easily. If so, getting out wouldn’t be nearly so simple.
    She couldn’t hide behind the planter forever. As though to punctuate that thought, one of the gate guards peered through the gate at her, a drawn dagger in his hand. Without waiting to find out his intentions, she took a deep breath and leapt, rolling across the wet cobbles, to the dubious shelter of a planter closer to the house.
    More arrows clattered around her. She crouched behind her new protection, panting a little and not at all sure that she was going in the right direction. If she’d tried, she could probably have made it to the fence and been up and over relatively fast. Rubbing her hands against her leggings, she thought about gripping wet, rusty metal and reconsidered that idea.
    And even if she had succeeded in running away, what then? Involve the king in the matter, have guards called out to attack her own home, probably half destroying it in the process? No. This was Family business, not something for Bright Bay authority to meddle in.
    She’d handle it herself.
    A definite advantage of her new position was that a large planter stood between her and the gate now, blocking any straight-line shot that might come from that direction. But the more time she took to think about her next move, the more time her opponents would have to prepare for it. She launched herself from shelter again, tumbling across hard ground that ripped her clothes and scraped the exposed skin on her hands, elbows, and knees.
    She ignored the stinging, gritty pain as trivial and made it to the side of the main building before the arrows had finished splattering across the courtyard. Three men rose from concealment as she arrived, long daggers in their hands; no doubt as to their intent.
    With no leisure time in which to capture their wills, Alyea had no option but to fight.
    As three more men came in behind her, she began to wish she’d opted for retreat after all.

Chapter Five
    Deiq read the letter three times, carefully sorting through for anything left unsaid; but Idisio had been brutally direct, even explicit, in a way that sent a shiver up Deiq’s arms. The young ha’ra’ha made no defense of his actions in his explanation: he’d killed a human by feeding—not a particularly troublesome issue to Deiq’s way of thinking, as the younger hadn’t been caught, but Idisio clearly loathed himself for it.
    I hated myself for the same thing, a matter of days ago, Deiq thought ruefully. But Idisio’s situation wasn’t at all the same as it had been with Meer; Idisio had been misled into the action by his mother and had no real blame to attach to himself over the killing. And after all, Idisio was ha’ra’ha; this would have happened sooner or later, like it or not.
    Ha’ra’hain liked killing, when all the surface gloss was stripped away. Feeding from a desert lord was...adequate. A feeding that took an entire life...was considerably more than that. Youngers had to learn to restrain themselves, just as desert lords needed to rein in their passions and tempers after the change.
    Deiq sighed. I should have had that long talk with him before his