"HE'S SENDING ME AWAY!" Tallisett paced angrily to the long windows of her sister's room, the dark-green wool of her skirt sweeping across the tufted green-and-purple rugs, her hair catching a wheaten gleam as she passed through the windows' latticed light. Her sister Damson, seated beside the cold fireplace in the long brocade gown she favored in her rooms because it hid her partridge plumpness, didn't look up.

"He wouldn't even see me!" Tally continued passionately. "He said he was ill, but he was out hunting yesterday... He sent his chamberlain to tell me!"

"Father is ill," Damson replied, her voice low. Her short, stubby fingers continued to move over the lace ruffle she was making, crossing and recrossing the glass bobbins over one another on the pillow with a faint, musical clinking as she worked, the sunlight sparkling on the jeweled galaxy of her rings. "It's the summer heat, you know. It brings on the flux unexpectedly. He was taken ill last night. So were Esrex and Elucida, a little."

"But why?"

Damson was silent for a few moments more, her hands like stout little overdecorated spiders spinning a web. In this room the strong summer sunlight was broken into harlequin shards by the window grilles and softened by the moire shadows of the trees in the water garden outside; beyond Damson's shoulder, Tally could see into the small room that had been fitted up as a private chapel to Agon, the Hidden One, Lord of the Eclipsed Sun. The smell of incense lay thick upon the air.

"Father thought it would be best." She sounded maddeningly like Esrex. Tally sometimes tried to remember whether her older sister had been that secretive, that calculating, that single-minded, before she'd married their cousin. But it had been twelve years, and her recollections of that time were little more than a child's, passionately worshipful of everything her sister said and did. In those days she had also had nothing to hide herself.

"We've heard that the Serpentlady of Dun is in the town," Damson went on, her owlish, protuberant eyes still fixed upon the twinkling bobbins. "And Erigalt of Pelter. With the Archmage still here, there are those who say it's scandalous for the Duke's daughter to be spending her time - "

"Who says?" Tally demanded, and this time Damson looked up at her, mildly blinking, her face a careful blank.

"It is nearly the summer solstice," she said. "With what the mages do at that time, Father thinks it would be better if you were somewhere else."

"What do they do?" Tally strode back, to stand over the shorter woman, hands on her hips. "Don't tell me you believe the mages hold orgies at midnight..."

"You know they do."

"Some sects do. Not the Morkensiks, or the Selarnists, or..."

"You're arguing semantics now," her sister said placidly, and went back to her lacemaking. "I know what Father told me, about why he thinks it better that you leave. Is Jaldis returning then, too?" And without appearing to, she watched her sister's face from beneath straight little bronze lashes.

Tally bit her lip and looked away. A week's custom hadn't dulled the hurt of what Shavus Ciarnin had told her he had heard, in the dark of a dream, sleeping beside the Well.

In a gentler voice, Damson asked, "You've heard something, then?"

Tally shook her head and turned away. Damson, with remarkable quickness for one of her soft bulk, set aside the pillow and got to her feet, catching her sister's slim brown wrist in her hand. "Please," she said, her voice low now as they stood in the chapel door. "This is for your own good, Tally. You may not think they commit abominations at the turning of the year's tides, but - "

"Who told you they were coming here?" Tally countered softly. "The priests of Agon?"

Damson's round gray eyes shifted. "Don't mock at Agon's Cult." She glanced into the close, tiny room beside them, as if behind the stone doors of the shrine, smooth and featureless like everything about that Cult, the Veiled God listened to all they said. "Yes, his devotees are everywhere. Since Esrex has become one of the inner circle of initiates he has learned a great deal; many things are now possible for our House. The influence of the High Priest Mijac may very well end in Elucida marrying the Heir."

"The Heir?" For a moment Tally thought she meant Dinias. "You mean the Queen's Heir? He's only a toddler!"

"He's turned four," Damson pointed out reasonably. "And the Queen has miscarried twice, it isn't likely now she'll give him a rival. What's six years, when he's fourteen and she twenty? It isn't as if she has a - romantic disposition, as you did."

She was watching Tally closely now. Rhion's name hung unspoken between them, fraught with a shaky tangle of joy to know he was alive and terror of the unknown dangers in which he stood. I'm in trouble, help me, please, Shavus had reported he had said. Get me out of here... Get me out... Tally said nothing.

"Tally," Damson said slowly. "I don't know whether you've done - anything foolish - since you married Marc. Esrex..." There was long silence, the old scandal and blackmail and coercion conjured for a moment, like the heart-twisting smell of a remembered perfume. Since the night it had happened - Rhion's arrest, Tally's imprisonment, the terror of not knowing what would meet her when she was finally sent for - neither sister had spoken of it - of it, or of anything else they thought or felt. They had become strangers, except for the knowledge that bound them at their roots.

After a moment Damson went on, with a certain amount of difficulty, "I'm telling you now, that kind of thing isn't possible, if Elucida does in fact marry the Queen's son. There must be no breath of scandal. Stop being naive. If Father found out, he would never permit it."

"You mean Esrex would never permit it," Tally replied, her voice low and perfectly level now. "For whom do you think your husband is doing this, Damson? Uniting the realm of Varle with the Bragenmere lands by becoming governor, making advantageous alliances that will put the lord of those joint realms on any royal Council, putting out of commission anyone who might be able to use other than military power against him? You think your husband is doing that to help Father? To help the man who ousted Esrex' family from the Ducal Seat? Who's being naive? Or is that something you'd just rather not know about?"

She pulled her hand away from her sister's moist grasp and stood for a moment considering her, the cold weariness in her heart that comes with the final realization that the one you have loved has not existed for a good many years. It was a woman of thirty-five she saw, finally, and no longer the unconscious image of a plump, witty, brilliant girl of eighteen. She felt tired, and just a little sick - not like a child who has lost a cherished toy, but who has discovered in that toy a breeding place of maggots and grubs. "I suppose the real question," she finished quietly, "is whether you're a fool or Esrex' whore."

And turning, she left the vestibule and strode down the corridor, her long green skirts billowing in her wake. For a long time Damson stood without moving, round face irresolute, upon the threshold of the Shadowed God.