[Carillon]

She hovered in the doorway like a spectre, watching the boy sleep as she rocked Aislin back and forth. His nightmares came less frequently now, though they had not disappeared entirely. Her elven eyes cut through the dark and traced the shape of his form. Even in sleep, she could see faint signs of strain on Finn's face, and she mentally amended her label—this was no boy. There was no trace of childhood left in his eyes. Not after they had told him about his sister.

Aislin thrashed a sleepy fist and pressed her hot, sticky cheek against Jaelle's breast. What was it some wit had said? Love was staying up all night with a sick child, or a healthy adult. She murmured words of comfort to her daughter and slipped away from Finn's bed, back to the ewer of water in her own room. Gently, she sponged Aislin's skin with the tepid liquid, assessing the fever. It was breaking, she thought. The baby's beautiful pale skin was less flushed, and she was breathing more easily now. Nonetheless, it wouldn't do to have her take a chill.

She kissed her daughter and lowered her into the cradle. She paused for a few moments, stroking the wood and admiring the detailing. Whatever else one might say about the man, Sallaron knew what he was doing in the field of carpentry. Then, she turned back to the desk, and the neat piles of papers. She picked one up at random and analyzed the text, then set it down again. They were as good as they could be, and she could make them no better. She left the other neat piles undisturbed.

Tomorrow ... tomorrow she'd find someone to watch Aislin. She hoped the fever was entirely gone by then. It was never easy to leave her daughter, but leaving her when she was sick was far more difficult. Nonetheless, they had little choice. They had taken a long time to plan it all out and set it into motion, and she needed to deliver the papers tomorrow or the next day. She wondered who would be watching her do it, and whether they'd be caught. She realized that she wasn't afraid—or at least not enough to hesitate.

Unable to reverie, she wrapped her favourite shawl around her shoulders and settled into a chair beside the cradle. The shawl was a deep crimson silk from Corsain that Oriana had sent a year ago, along with a letter in her beautiful ink-and-brush calligraphy. Jaelle had written back, thanking her for the shawl, and paid her more generously than usual. Her petite, businesslike couturier had been a godsend of a find, and over the years they had also become good friends.

Jaelle closed her eyes. She saw red blood, and a child's dead eyes, and opened them again. She tried to count backwards from a thousand, first in elven and then in common. When that failed, she tried reciting long passages of Runic Sequencing and Surface Enchantments in her mind, willing the jargon to weigh her down enough to rest. Her mind still raced, so she pulled out a folder of papers and sat and studied them in the flickering candlelight. If she could not reverie, she would do something useful. She sat curled in the chair, and chased the slippery, serpentine consonants of the dragon-tongue around in her mouth.

The hour-rings of the candle disappeared, one by one, and the dark sky through the windowpane bleached in anticipation of the coming dawn. Still, she did not sleep.