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Before she could wrench it free, Szorak threw. His dagger buried itself in her throat. The venom that coated it finished the job his strangle cord had begun. The priestess stiffened, her sword trembling in her hands and her eyes rolling back in her head.

Szorak caught her as she fell. Once more, he pressed his mouth against hers and inhaled—and his mask drank in her soul. He pressed his body against hers, savoring the moment. Even through his clothes, her bare skin felt hot, slippery with sweat from their struggle and slick with blood from the wound in her throat. Fully aroused, Szorak fumbled with his trousers. He would take her, he decided fiercely. Just as the priestesses of Menzoberranzan had taken him, so many times when he was just a boy, to satisfy their dark and disgusting needs. Leering behind his mask, he savored the thrill of what he was about to do, mere steps away from Eilistraee’s sacred grove. While the song of her oblivious faithful wafted through the trees, he would—

Something slid into his back, penetrating cloth and flesh, something cold and sharp. A sword blade. As pain rushed into the void it had pierced in his body, Szorak twisted his head, a shocked expression on his face. A priestess of Eilistraee loomed above him, her face obscured by the moonlight that haloed her hair in a fierce white blaze. For a moment, he thought he recognized her.

“Seyll?” he gasped.

If it was Seyll, she made no reply. Placing a foot on his back, the priestess yanked the sword free. The blood that coated it—Szorak’s own blood—dribbled from its point into his blinking eyes.

Eilistraee, spitting in his face.

Then blackness claimed him.

CHAPTER EIGHT

Q’arlynd watched from a distance as Leliana, Rowaan, and the other priestesses who had survived the drider attack stood under the tree and sang, completing their sacred observances for the six who had died at the judicator’s hand. Normally, Rowaan had explained, the bodies of the faithful were lashed into a bier high in the treetops, but the judicator’s magical attack had left nothing behind of those he had slain. The priestesses had been forced to make do with empty clothing and armor. These they had bundled and lain to rest in the bare branches of the trees to be washed by moonlight—“Eilistraee’s tears.”

At the moment, however, the night sky was overcast. It wasn’t moonlight that fell on the bundles in the treetops but snow. Q’arlynd had read about the stuff in books, but this was the first time he’d experienced it firsthand. It dusted his piwafwi like a thick layer of drifting spores—except that these “spores” of frozen water were cold and melted on contact with the skin. They soaked right through his piwafwi and into his shirt, making him shiver.

He squinted as the wind blew snow into his eyes. Why he’d lingered to watch the singing, he couldn’t say. He was still very much an outsider, despite having spoken the vows that had admitted him to Eilistraee’s faith. Males weren’t invited to join the sacred dances, nor could they lend their voices to the Evensong. Eilistraee granted magic to her priestesses only, and males could play but a supporting role, just as in Lolth’s faith.

Like mother, like daughter, Q’arlynd supposed.

The song ended. The ritual was over. Q’arlynd waved at Rowaan, beckoning her over. She glanced at Leliana, who shrugged, then walked toward him, her boots crunching holes into the ankle-deep snow.

Q’arlynd bowed his head as she approached. “Lady,” he said. “May I ask a question?”

“Call me Rowaan. We’re all equals, in Eilistraee’s eyes.”

Hardly, Q’arlynd thought.

“What’s your question?”

Q’arlynd took a deep breath. As a boy, he’d once asked this question of one of Lolth’s priestesses and gotten a thorough whipping in reply, but he was curious to know what awaited him in the afterlife, having accepted Eilistraee as his patron deity. “What was it like—being dead?”

Rowaan was silent for several moments. “You want to know what awaits