Page 123 of Time's Fool

“She was convincing you!

“She lost too much and it broke her. I lost even more, but it didn’t break me—”

“But it changed you,” Gillian said roughly. “You talk like the Circle. They want to command, to shut down any voice but theirs, to force obedience. We’re supposed to be better than that—”

“—and it didn’t break you!” the ghost got into her face, so closely that her unearthly light tinted Gillian’s hair, and made strange shadows upon her cheeks. “I watched you; followed you. Talk like Rilda all you want, but you think like me and we both know it. I saw you stare down the Circle’s men and refuse to move out of the way for them, even in the corridors of the palace itself. Saw you make them give way for you.

“Saw the hate on your face, and the contempt in your eyes, and knew that you view them as I do. Together, we can—”

“There is no together, Morgan!”

“You would let them win, then?”

“They already won!” Gillian said furiously. “It’s over! We are supposed to be saving what’s left, not risking annihilation!”

“Over?” the ghost smiled, and Kit finally managed to flop out of his prison and onto the deck, because it was not a nice smile. And the words that followed were even worse. “They kill you, too, you know,” Morgan said mildly.

“What?” Gillian blinked at her.

“Oh, I know, you didn’t die with the rest of us, slaughtered like pigs in autumn. You went to prison instead. There were too many eyes when they came for you; too many witnesses. They couldn’t risk the easy way out. And they thought you just a common witch in any case.

“They learned differently. And the Circle brooks no competition. So, they bided their time and they got you in the end. I know because I saw it; I saw you, your dead eyes staring at the sky, just as mine did. And for the same reason.”

Gillian looked as if she had just decided that it might be possible for ghosts to go mad, and Kit tended to agree. “Morgan, I’m not dead—”

“Not yet. But if you think you’ll live to see that daughter of yours grow up, think again.”

“What are you talking about—”

“Your death, girl,” Morgan said, suddenly vicious. “The Circle stole your life like they stole mine, although you dodged it a bit longer. But you took the same route home from court every day, thinking yourself safe with those vampire guards of yours, and they got you. Cursed you right in between those two fools before they knew what was happening.

“I supposed they got tired of trying to be subtle.”

Gillian just stared at her some more, and Morgan smiled. “Still think this doesn’t have anything to do with you?”

“You . . . you’ve lost your senses.”

“On the contrary, I see more now than I ever have. Take your good friend Rilda, for instance. She died in 1595, but the mistake the mother’s made was seven years before that. If we change the outcome of that battle, nothing that follows will be the same. You scold me for killing her, but if we do this right, she won’t die, for she’ll never be at that pathetic excuse for an alehouse in the first place.

“Such shelters won’t be necessary when our people aren’t rats scurrying in corners, but ruling these lands! Her coven will live, as will mine—as will yours. We control the future, you and I, from this moment on, and can shape it any way we like.

“But it’s a difficult concept, I grant you. It took me years to understand. Perhaps you need a more potent example.”

And before Kit could wonder what that meant, a dizzying feeling caught him, and he was suddenly hitting down onto wet ground, with several heavy bales of carpets smacking him in the head. The bales must have come from the ship, sucked into the portal along with them. Only he didn’t see a portal.

He didn’t see anything except for a sky that looked like the devil’s anus.

Kit stared upward at roiling green and black clouds, like a terrible bruise, circling a spiraling vortex straight out of hell. It was huge, covered the whole sky, and was laced with enough lightning to sear his vision with brilliant, crisscrossing scars. Not that he needed to see to know that that wasn’t a normal storm.

There was magic in it, thick enough that it felt like trying to breathe through soup, with tiny bits that flayed his skin as they swirled past. And before Kit could stop it, his vampire senses dropped him into slow time. That was the usual response to a major threat, giving him more time to think.

But it didn’t help him now.

He looked about, staring past the jagged red lines that the lightning had left on his vision, but all he saw under the awful sky were dark, thrashing trees and leaf-laced wind that was half rain. The latter beat him up whenever he tried to stand, whipping plant matter and small pebbles at him, or maybe that was hail. He didn’t know; couldn’t see!

And his legs weren’t helping. They felt like jelly underneath him, wobbling even without the storm’s help. He was still trying to convince himself that he could stand when he heard Gillian’s voice, sounding frantic.

“Get out of me! Get out!”

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