Read Online The Shadow Sorceress by L. E. Modesitt Jr. - Free Book Online Page A

death, although he would regret deeply the loss of the power Anna had held and always used for the benefit of Defalk and its people.
    Secca took a deep breath. Now she would have to deal more with Robero, as Anna had suggested—and with Jolyn and Clayre. She pushed that thought away. Those problems could wait.
    How long she stood, looking at Anna’s visage, missing the fierce blue eyes, forever closed in what seemed endless sleep, Secca neither knew nor cared. A deep void had opened within her, like a wound she doubted would ever close, always aching, even beneath any smile she might offer.
    So motionless had she stood, wrapped in grief, that only the aching of legs locked too tightly finally broke through the concentration of her vigil.
    Slowly, slowly, she stepped back and then slipped around the catafalque and walked slowly through the second archway and toward the grand staircase, her boots murmuring on the hard stone.
    Behind her remained the guards, watching over the sorceress who had watched over them for all their lives.

13
    In the bedchamber right at the top of the grand staircase—the one Anna had first used when she had come to Loiseau, a chamber larger than the master chamber in Secca’s own hold of Flossbend—the red-haired sorceress dressed slowly in the grayness before dawn. She donned dark green trousers and a lighter colored silky green shirt, but with a black vest and a black mourning scarf.
    She looked at her image in the robing room mirror, a mirror fringed with moisture from the hot bath she had hoped would relieve the stiffness that had come with an uneasy sleep. Amber eyes ringed with dark circles and set above still-freckled and youthful-looking cheeks looked back at her. She frowned, if wryly. More than a score and a half of years behind her, and she still stood little taller than the youngest of apprentice sorceresses. After a moment, she turned, heading toward the door to face a day she dreaded.
    She had to talk about Anna, and she wasn’t quite sure she’d ever understood Anna. “But maybe I will…like the vocalises…” While Secca had appreciated Anna’s insistence on all the women apprentice sorceresses and fosterlings learning skills with blades, perhaps because of the attack on Falcor when Secca had been a child, Secca had been well into her twenties before she had begun to understand fully the value of the vocal exercises and endless technique—or the songs from the Mist Worlds that were scarcely spells at all, except perhaps love spells. And the thought of learning songs or spells in five or six languages, as Anna had…Secca wondered if anyone besides Clayre or Jolyn really understood, or even whether they truly did.
    Today…all she could do was to express the feeling of loss, and that would have to do, but, inside, she knew that was far from enough.
    Would Secca ever understand—or would she be old and unable to explain to anyone else before she did?
    For all the older sorceress’s love and kindness to Secca, Anna had not shied from delivering tongue-lashings to Secca herself—or even to Robero, or to Lord Jecks, or to apprentices, like Richina. Yet Anna had gone out of her way for all of them, and for people she had scarcely even met, and she had tried her best to heal a land that had been wounded throughout most of its long and bloody history.
    Perhaps Secca’s father had said it best, decades past, when he had told Secca, before sending her to Anna in Falcor, “She is a good woman, but far from perfect. Accept her goodness, and do not expect perfection.”
    But then, in ruling Defalk or any land, could anyone be perfect? Secca’s lips twisted into another wry expression as she opened the door into the upper corridor.
    â€œYour thoughts are wandering,” she murmured to herself. How could they not wander? In most ways, for almost all of Secca’s life—or at least the last twenty-five