For a long, long minute after the messenger told the duke that one guard was dead and another wounded in the inner keep, no one made a sound. Sandry rested her hands on the duke’s shoulders, not liking the expression in his eyes. She knew this had to cut deeply. An assassin had made his or her way to the very heart of Vedris’s power. Erdogun’s brown face was tinged scarlet with humiliation at being proven wrong almost as soon as he had called Lark an alarmist.

At last the duke looked up at Sandry and gave her a thin smile, patting one of her hands. “Must you do this with Pasco?” he inquired. “The boy is nice enough, but he doesn’t seem very reliable.”

Sandry glanced at Lark. “We did talk about another way, but—,” She swallowed.

“Truly, Uncle, I prefer this.”

The duke frowned. “What is this other way that you find so distasteful?”

Lark sighed. “We discussed shaping the unmagic as a web, rather than a net, and blanketing the inner keep with it, like a spiders web. When the assassins come, they’ll touch it and—well, they won’t stick to it, exactly. The nothingness in them would become part of the web.”

“Then I could take the web and unravel it, maybe even spin it into one cord,”

Sandry explained. “The problem is, Uncle, I couldn’t save the parts of them that are still real. If I had to do it that way, I’d kill them—if it even worked.”

“We know the net-spell will do the job,” Lark assured the duke. “And if Pasco calls these people to the net, we can make sure no innocents will be trapped.

We’ll meet the Dihanurs on our terms, not theirs.”

“Have you spoken to Pasco?” asked the duke wearily.

“No,” replied Sandry. “I wanted to work it all out be fore I talked to him.”

“He’ll refuse,” Erdogun said tartly. “If he has a whit of sense, he’ll refuse.”

CHAPTER 12

I could help catch rats?” Pasco demanded, eyes alight. It was the next morning, at Yazmin’s school. “By dancing?

“That’s the idea,” Sandry told him.

Pasco jumped up gleefully. “That will show them!” he cried. “Tippy-feet indeed!”

Sandry looked at her hands and smiled. She had thought Pasco might see it that way. “We’re not sure we can do it,” she warned. “I still have to make the net.”

“But you will, and I’ll dance it, and we’ll have rats in it. A nice day’s fishing for a Toren and an Acalon, don’t you think?”

Sandry grinned at him. “I do think.”

Pasco carefully lowered himself into a split, wincing as he completed it. “We can do it,” he told her, his face serious. “You can do anything.”

“We’ll see,” she replied. “It may come to nothing if I can’t work that stuff into a proper net. Now settle down. Let’s try meditation.”

He did a little better today. Sandry could see his magic did not stray so far from him. It also didn’t flicker as much as it had, which told her that his attention wandered less. Maybe he just needs something useful to do, she thought as the city’s clocks chimed the hour. Some thing his family thinks is useful, anyway.

As she took up her ward and Pasco stretched his legs, Yazmín walked in. “You said when you got here that you’ve something important to discuss?” she asked Sandry.

“We’re going to make a net-dance for rat-trapping,” Pasco told her cheerfully.

“And I’m going to dance it.”

“It’s a way to catch these killers,” explained Sandry. “If you don’t mind, we’d like your help with creating the dance, and getting Pasco ready for it.

Everything has to be planned to the inch. One wrong step—if he so much as brushes the unmagic—,” Sandry gulped. “I think the net would devour him.”

“Never fear,” Yazmín said cheerfully. “I can get him so he’ll be able to hit a dot on the floor, blindfolded, every time. A small dot.” Pasco sat with his left leg straight out in front of him as he tried to grip his foot and touch his forehead to his knee. Yazmín pressed down on his left knee with one hand as she pulled back on his toes, forcing him to stretch an extra inch. He whimpered, then touched his forehead to his knee and held the position to a count of ten.

Sandry watched them solemnly. “If you’ve any doubt he’ll be able to do it, I have to know right now,” she told Yazmín quietly.

The dancer looked at her and smiled. “You’re using that dance he showed me the other day as the basic, right?”

Sandry nodded.

“How long till you’re ready to go?”

“I want another look at the net he used for the fishing spell,” Sandry replied.

“I’ll do that today, and I’m to help Behazin and Ulrina—the harrier-mages—distill the rest of the unmagic out of what Master Wulf—,” a lump rose in her throat. She coughed to clear it, blinked rapidly until her eyes didn’t sting any more, and went on—,”out of what was gathered yesterday. Tonight I’ll sketch a rough net for us to look at in the morning. We’ll work on the dance while everything else is being made ready at Winding Circle—two more days, I think. And you can work with Pasco some more while I spin and make the net.

Will that be enough time? Three or four days?”

”I’ll spend every waking minute with our friend, here,” Yazmín said with a wink to Sandry. “I’ll give him all the personal attention he can stand.”