Fortune's Fool by Mercedes Lackey

Author:Mercedes Lackey
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9781426814822
Publisher: Luna
Published: 2007-02-14T10:00:00+00:00

Away over the hills, a tiny paper bird shot across the sky, as swift as an arrow, swifter than a falcon. The spell that animated it had found a target and it was closing in fast.

Chapter 11

There were six girls in the Jinn’s keeping now, and one of them was trying to kill the other five.

It wasn’t the Wolf-girl, either. Katya got along perfectly well with her. She was clean, polite, a little shy, but just as determined to find a way out of this captivity as Katya was. More than that, she better understood the ramifications of this terrible desert than any of the rest of them.

No, the one that was trying to kill the rest of the girls was a Rusalka.

How and where the Jinn had gotten hold of her, Katya could not imagine. Why he had stolen her, she also had difficulty in understanding. This one was not a ghost; she was a true water spirit, which did make her something of a rarity, and indeed, did make her very, very magical.

But—

She was vicious. She had taken over the fountain as soon as she was put down, and the first attempt at a friendly overture by the young sorceress was met with slashing talons. She drowned one of the Jinn’s men the very first night; after that he made the garden off-limits to them, which was a mixed blessing, because even though it meant there were no more guards posted in the garden itself, it also meant that the Rusalka could do whatever she wanted there.

And what she wanted was to kill everything that wasn’t her.

Now, she was a water spirit, and as such, Katya could probably control her. The trouble with that idea was that she did not want the Jinn to know she was that strong in magic. She wanted him to think her powers were very minor. If he tried to drain her, she wanted him to underestimate her ability to fight back. Part of her ability to disguise herself was an ability to mask part of her magic.

Katya had made several attempts at making friends without using magic, and they had all ended badly. The truth was, the creature was a stupid, vicious, violent thing in a beautiful young woman’s body. There was nothing there to make friends with. There was nothing anyone sane would want to make friends with.

Katya was beginning to get worried though. The paper crane should come back at any moment, and she wasn’t sure if it could find her in their room—

Worse, surely a brightly colored paper bird flitting down the hallway was bound to be noticed.

But the Rusalka had made the garden impossible for any of them to stay in.

As Katya was thinking just that, the Wolf-girl, Lyuba, dashed in wearing her Wolf form. She skidded to a stop and her shape writhed in a way that made Katya’s eyes water, and instead of the Wolf, there was something halfway between Wolf and human on all fours in the middle of the room.

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