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the portmanteau and fastening the two leather straps. One day she would succeed in convincing her papa to send Loringa away, and theirs would be a normal life, the sort she had dreamed of as she grew up alone and lonely in the convent, believing herself to be without family. “So you seem to have convinced him. It makes my stomach sick.”
    “Sick with the jealousy you feel. Because he needs me, and he does not need you, devil’s child. You merely amuse him, even now. But you wish to make him love you,” Loringa said, pushing herself up, her colorful skirts covering feet she could no longer house comfortably in anything other than a pair of man’s slippers she had cut holes in so that her misshapen bones could protrude in places. Her coarse, graying black hair was in a thick braid wrapped tightly about her head, her round cheeks had begun to lose their fight with the years and her hands were large, like a man’s, and gnarled, like old tree branches.
    If Loringa was so powerful as she kept saying, why didn’t she fix herself—her hands, her feet? In her body, she was an old woman.
    But the eyes? Loringa’s black bean eyes were alive. Too alive. And they saw too much, just as the ears heard too much.
    Loringa was, to Lisette, a malevolent spirit. At the same time, it was Loringa who told her stories of other days, years ago, and of her father’s bravery, of his daring adventures in the islands. Of his sorrow.
    “I do more than amuse him. He needs me, Loringa. He came for me as soon as he could. And he has allowed me this most important mission.”
    The priestess shrugged her shoulders. “I suppose so. He loved the mother of the child. He is curious about you. A man grows older, and he begins to think about death, and who he might leave behind to remember him. A man is never dead, while someone remembers him. I will go before him, to make ready for him, so it will be left to you to keep his memory.”
    Lisette softened, aware that Loringa truly cared for her father. “Tell me again, Loringa, please. Tell me about my mother…and the rest.”
    “To give you courage as you go into battle? To remind you why you’re doing what you will do?”
    “I know why,” Lisette said, pulling a cloak from the wardrobe and slinging it over her shoulders. “I know I’m a motherless child, and I know why. I know why I grew up alone, with the nuns, never knowing my parents. I know what was taken from me. But I want to hear you tell the story again.”
    “So that when the time comes, if it comes, you will shed no tears for the man who makes you cry out his name in pleasure in the night.”
    Lisette turned her back on the woman. “Now you go too far. Listening at keyholes? Is that your magick ?”
    “Why do we fight, devil’s child? My own devil’s own spawn, the ungrateful child whose life I saved for her? Is it because this is so important? Yes, that is why. He isn’t truly convinced, your papa, he doesn’t believe me when I say I can feel her, that she can feel me, that this fool Becket is truly the one who will lead where we wish to go. Even if her evil master has already escaped our justice through death, we will at least be able to deal with her, and with the others that we find with her. That, after all this time, vengeance may be within reach.”
    “Forgive me, Loringa. We’re both fighting the same battle.”
    “We know the name. Becket. Luck was in with us in London, even as it was out, and we learned the name. Before he died in his gaol cell, before his throat was cut and stopped him, the fool, Eccles, he did nothing but bleat the name of the man who had captured him, questioned him and then delivered him to this place called the War Office, and certain death. The names Eccles heard others call him. Becket, Becket. A soldier, surely. An officer of the English Crown.”
    Lisette nodded, knowing the story. “But only that—Becket. Not even a full name. It seems so little for…for all of this.”
    “It was