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Gurn assigned her during the day, and she grew used to his silent, if odorous company.
    In that time she’d seen nothing of Silhara yet felt his presence in Neith’s every crook and crevice.  She’d met him only once so far, but his image was burned into her mind.  He reminded her of a captured whirlwind, spinning fiercely in place, waiting only for the moment to burst free of its confines and blast the surrounding land.  Cumbria had assigned her no easy task.  Her freedom would be hard-won.
    A brisk breeze swept through her open window, dispelling some of Cael's pungent odor.  Dust motes danced in a spiral before come to rest on his coat in a glittering net.  In the early dawn light Corruption's star shown dull amidst tinted clouds.  The star never remained stationary.  Yesterday it had washed the southern horizon in murky yellow light.  This morning it hovered in the eastern sky, nearly obscured by the sun's fiery ascent.
    Cael snarled softly.  His eyes were red once more as he also watched the star, and his fur bristled.  No one knew what drew the hounds to magic, but they sought it in the same way an ordinary dog tracked prey.  Cael had first reacted to her with restrained animosity, typical of a trained mage-finder when introduced to one of the Gifted.  His reaction to Corruption’s manifestation was different.  The animal exuded hatred, a bestial hostility at its fiercest.  His lips curled back, exposing fangs as long as her fingers.  Were the god to take a more earthly form, she had no doubt Cael would leap out the window in an effort to hunt it down and rip it apart.
    If he were an ordinary dog instead of a mage-finder, Martise might have patted his back in reassurance.  But she was reluctant to touch him, wary of having her hand bitten off for her presumption.  And he smelled worse than a privy.
    “Come on, boy,” she said and left the window.  “Gurn will be wondering where I am.”  Her stomach growled, and she swore Cael’s bushy eyebrows wriggled in amusement.  “I don’t want to miss out on the porridge either.”
    She made quick work of her ablutions and dressed in one of her borrowed cyrtels, castoffs from Cumbria’s wife’s ever changing wardrobe.  She wrapped her hair in a tight bun and secured it with two wooden hair pins.  “Dull and plain as a potato,” she murmured and smoothed the front of her cyrtel.  She wasn’t here to seduce, only betray.  Her beauty, or lack of it, played no part in this game.  And the game might never begin if she didn’t see Silhara more frequently.
    Gurn had left a half-full oil lamp for her, a necessary navigation aid in Neith's dark corridors.  Martise lit the lamp and motioned Cael out the door.  The hallway winding through the manor's second floor was just as dark in the morning.  Her lamp provided the only light, a weak luminescence that sent shadows chasing each other across the cracked walls and buckled floor.
    Cumbria's comment about Neith being a hovel was rude but not far off the mark.  This was truly a poor man's house, despite its size and decrepit grandeur.  She hopped over a hole in the floor and rose on her toes as the boards groaned in protest beneath her feet.  Dust covered every surface.  Remnants of cobwebs fluttered like tattered lace from ceiling beams, caressing her head as she passed beneath them.  Her skin crawled, and she tried not to dwell on the possibility of a spider trapped in her hair.
    Was Silhara an aristocrat with only bloodlines to give him value?  After the droughts and famines swept the far lands when she was a child, many of the aristo families were reduced to begging and selling their possessions just to feed themselves.  Had such misfortunes brought his family to ruin?
    It was the only thing she could think of to explain his haughtiness.  He seemed a man born to rule—if not a country than certainly a fiefdom, a dale.  His behavior toward Cumbria was insolent, as if he considered