Rikka shrugged. "I can get you some fresh bread if you'd like."

"It's stew," he exclaimed with a scowl. "Stew calls for real biscuits, not bread."

"If I had known you wanted biscuits for dinner I could have made you biscuits rather than the stew. You should have said something earlier."

"I don't want biscuits instead of stew," Zedd growled.

"You change your mind a lot when you're grumpy, don't you?"

Zedd squinted at her with one eye. "You really are talented at torture."

She smiled, turned on a heel, and strode regally out of the small room. Zedd thought that Mord-Sith must strut even when they were alone.

He went back to the book, trying to come at the problem from a different angle. He had only had time to read the passage again a couple of times when the latch on the door lifted and Rachel shuffled into the room carrying something in both hands. She used her foot to push the door closed

"Zedd, you should put your book away, now, and have some supper."

Zedd smiled at the child. She always made him smile. She was infectious that way.

"What have you got there, Rachel?"

She reached up and set the tin bowl on the desk, then stretched her arm out as she pushed it across the desk toward him.

"Biscuits."

Flabbergasted, Zedd rose up a little from his chair to lean over and look in the tin bowl.

"What are you doing with biscuits?"

Rachel's big eyes blinked at him as if it were the strangest question she had ever heard. "They're for your supper. Rikka asked me to carry them for her. She had her hands full with a bowl of stew for you and one for Chase."

"You shouldn't help that woman," Zedd said with a menacing scowl as he sat back down. "She's evil."

Rachel giggled. "You're silly, Zedd. Rikka tells me stories about the stars. She makes pictures out of them and then tells a story about each picture."

"Is that so. Well, sounds like a nice thing for her to do."

With the light fading, it was getting hard to read. Zedd cast out a hand, sending a spark of his gift into the dozens of candles in the elaborate iron candelabrum. The warm light brightened the cozy little room, lighting the finely fit stone of the walls and the heavy oak beams across the ceiling.

Rachel grinned, her eyes glistening with both reflected points of candlelight and with wonder. She liked seeing him light candles. "You have the bestest magic, Zedd."

Zedd sighed. "I wish you weren't leaving me, little one. Rikka doesn't appreciate my candle-lighting trick."

"You will miss me?"

"No, not really. I just don't want to be left alone with Rikka," he said as he read the last bit again.

They will at first contest him before they plot to heal him. What could that mean?

"Maybe you could get Rikka to tell you some stories about the stars." Rachel began looking sad as she came around the desk. "I'll miss you something awful, Zedd."

Zedd looked up from the book. Rachel held her arms out, wanting a hug. A smile overcame him as he scooped her into his arms. There were few things in life that felt as good as a hug from Rachel. She was a devotee of the hug, never putting less than her full enthusiasm into it.

"You have good hugs, Zedd. Richard has good hugs, too."

"Yes he does."

Zedd remembered being in that very room, so long ago, when his own daughter was about the same age as Rachel. She, too, would come to see him and want a hug. Now, all that he had left was Richard. Zedd missed him terribly.

"I will miss you, little one, but before you know it you will be back here with the rest of your family and then you will have brothers and sisters to play with instead of just an old man." Zedd sat her on his knee. "It will be good to have all of you at the Wizard's Keep with me. The Keep will be a joyful place, what with life in it again."

"Rikka said that she will never have to cook again once my mother comes here."

Zedd took a sip of lukewarm tea from a pewter mug on the chest beside him. "Did she now."

Rachel nodded. "And she said that my mother would probably make you brush your hair." She held out her hands, wanting to share a drink from his mug. He let her gulp tea.

Zedd cocked his head. "Brush my hair?"

Rachel nodded with a serious look. "It sticks all out. But I like it."

"Rachel," Chase said as he ducked in through the round-topped door way, "are you bothering Zedd, again?"

Rachel shook her head. "I brought him biscuits. Rikka said he likes his cuits with his stew and I should bring him a whole bowl full."

Chase planted his fists on his hips. "And how is he supposed to eat his biscuits with ugly children sitting on his lap? You could scare his appetite right out of him."

Rachel giggled as she hopped down.

Zedd glanced at the book again. "Are you all packed up?"

"Yes," the big man said. "I want to get an early start. We'll leave first thing in the morning, if that's still all right with you."

Zedd dismissed the concern with a wave of his hand as he studied the prophecy. "Yes, yes. The sooner you get your family back here, the better. We'll all feel better having them here where we know they will be safe and you will all be together."

Chase's heavy brow drew lower over his intent brown eyes. "Zedd, what's the matter? What's wrong?"

Zedd looked up with a frown. "Wrong? Nothing. Nothing is wrong."

"He's just busy reading," Rachel assured Chase as she hugged his leg and put her head against his hip.

"Zedd," Chase said in a demanding drawl that said he didn't believe a word of it.

"What makes you think something is wrong?"

"You haven't eaten a thing." Chase rested one hand on the wooden handle of a long knife at his belt and with the other caressed Rachel's head of long, golden blond hair. The man probably had a dozen knives of various sizes strapped around his waist and to his legs. When he left in the morning he would add swords and axes to the knives. "That can only mean something is wrong."

Zedd popped a biscuit in his mouth. "There," he mumbled around the mouthful. "Satisfied?"

While Zedd chewed the warm biscuit, Chase leaned down and lifted the girl's chin. "Rachel, go to your room and finish getting your things packed up. And I expect your knives to be cleaned and sharp as well."

She nodded earnestly. "They will be, Chase."

Rachel had had a hard life for one so young. For reasons that had always made Zedd suspicious, she'd been at the center of a variety of consequential situations. When Chase had taken the orphaned girl in to raise as his own daughter, Zedd himself had admonished the man to teach her to protect herself, to teach her to be like him so that she could defend herself and stay safe. Rachel adored Chase and eagerly learned all the lessons he taught her. With one of the smaller knives she carried, she could pin a fly to a fence post at ten paces.

"And I want you in bed early so that you will be rested," Chase told her. "I'm not carrying you if you're tired."

Rachel gave him a puzzled look. "You carry me when I tell you I'm not tired."

Chase cast Zedd a pained look before giving her a clearly feigned scowl. "Well, tomorrow you're just going to have to keep up on your own."

Rachel nodded seriously, unruffled by the man towering over her. "I will." She looked at Zedd. "Will you come and kiss me good night?"

"Of course," Zedd said with a smile of his own. "I'll be in after a bit to tuck you in."

He wondered if Rikka would stop by her room to tell her a story. It was heartwarming to think of the Mord-Sith telling a child stories about pictures made by the stars in the sky. Rachel seemed to have that effect on everyone.

Chase watched through the doorway as his daughter raced off down the broad rampart. Zedd had been gratified at the way she had taken to the Wizard's Keep. In short order she had made it hers and was happily skipping through halls that were thousands of years old. She minded well and never strayed from the areas Zedd had warned her about. She was a child who understood danger. Out on the rampart, she looked completely al ease as she paused momentarily to gaze through a crenellation down at the city below before racing off again. It seemed to Zedd a wonder that such spindly legs could carry the child so swiftly.