Diplomacy of Wolves: Book 1 of the Secret Texts by Lisle Holly

Author:Lisle, Holly [Lisle, Holly]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: FIC000000
ISBN: 9780759520141
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Published: 2000-10-01T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 17

Once in the sky and safely away from Galweigh House, Kait confronted the stranger who looked through her eyes, listened through her ears, and smelled the damp night air through her nose. The stranger kept silent, so that only the sense of presence and unfamiliar weight and the stranger’s occasional restless shifting inside the recesses of her mind convinced her that the silent, watchful presence was not a figment born of imagination and the day’s burden of grief and horror.

Kait started the engines in midair once she was sure she was well past the point where any of the Sabirs might hear them. She fought the tailwind that kept pushing the airible north more than west. And when the airship was securely en route to Goft, she said, “Now you can stop hiding and tell me who you are. And what you are.”

The stranger in her mind sighed. Does it matter? I can help you.

“It matters. Are you a demon of the sort which possesses people and drives them to speak to the air and foam at the mouth? Or are you a god who wants to require a task of me? Or are you something else?”

Nothing so grand as either a demon or a god. My name is Amalee Kehshara Rohannan Draclas.

Kait froze when she placed the name. “You’re my great-great-great-great-great-grandmother?” Amalee Draclas was a martyr, dead nearly two hundred years, and victim of none other than the Sabirs. Her torture and murder, according to Family history, had been carried out in front of the walls of Galweigh House, in full sight of her husband and children.

Yes.

Kait didn’t know what to say.

You doubt me.

“Yes.”

You’d be a foolish girl if you didn’t. I can prove who I am to you, though. And I can help you get revenge on the Sabirs.

That her many-times-great-grandmother would want revenge on the Sabirs, Kait could well believe. But that she should appear as a voice in Kait’s head . . .

Magic released me from the place where I had been imprisoned since the day the Sabirs murdered me. I have no body, of course. But I remember who I am, and my life before I was killed. And when I was released, I sought out a descendant. You were the one that survived.

“That makes sense, I suppose, though I never truly believed in spirits that visited the living. I always thought the dead went between the worlds and were reborn into new bodies and new lives.”

Your theory isn’t too far from the mark . . . unless sadistic torturers trap the spirit and cage it. I would surely have lived again before now, had they not done what they did to me.

Kait recalled the mayhem that had pushed her over the edge of the abyss into unconsciousness. Many voices had fought for her attention. Some of them—no, most of them—had been frightening.

I wasn’t the only spirit so trapped, Amalee said. And some of those with whom I’ve spent the last thou— . . .

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