"Hello, dire-daughter. Don't run for your healer's herbs. He can't hear you now. Only I can, and only you can answer."
The thing wearing Roderic sat down on the edge of the cot with a grace Roderic had never had, folded his hands with a patience that was not his, and looked at me out of his hollow eyes, and it was the strangest horror of my life, watching a woman four hundred years old drive the body of the man who threw me away.
I stayed in the doorway. I did not sit. I have sat at a great many bedsides and there is a rule to it, you sit when you mean to stay, and I did not mean to stay in a room where the walls could hear.
"Where's Roderic," I said. "The real one. Is he in there with you, listening."
"He hears everything," the Warden said, through him, mild as milk. "That is rather t
