Key Of Knowledge Read Free Page B

of it cruised along her skin. Deliberately, she ate the lamb. “Absolutely nothing.”
    SHE was spending most of her time ignoring him, and taking swipes with whatever time she had left over. That, Jordan thought, was Dana’s usual pattern when it came to him.
    He should be used to it.
    So the fact that it bothered him so much was his problem. Just as finding a way to make them friends again was his mission.
    They’d once been friends. And a great deal more. The factthat they weren’t now was his fault, and he would take the rap for it. But just how long was a man supposed to pay for ending a relationship? Wasn’t there a statute of limitations?
    She looked incredible, he decided as they gathered back in the parlor for coffee and brandy. But then, he’d always liked her looks, even when she’d been a kid, too tall for her age and with that pudge of baby fat still in her cheeks.
    There was no baby fat in evidence now. Anywhere. Just curves, a lot of gorgeous curves.
    She’d done something to her hair, he realized, some girl thing that added mysterious light to that dense brown. It made her eyes seem darker, deeper. God, how many times had he felt himself drowning in those rich chocolate eyes?
    Hadn’t he been entitled to come up for air?
    In any case, he’d meant what he’d said to her before. He was back now, and she was just going to have to get used to it. Just as she would have to get used to the fact that he was part of this tangle she’d gotten herself into.
    She was going to have to deal with him. And it would be his pleasure to make sure she had to deal with him as often as possible.
    Rowena rose. There was something in the movement, in the look of her, that tickled something at the edge of Jordan’s memory. Then she stepped forward, smiled, and the moment passed.
    â€œIf you’re ready, we should begin. I think it’s more suitable if we continue this in the other parlor.”
    â€œI’m ready.” Dana got to her feet, then looked at Zoe. “You?”
    â€œYeah.” Though she paled a bit, Zoe clasped hands with Dana. “The first time, all I could think was don’t let me be first. Now I just don’t know.”
    â€œMe either.”
    They moved down the great hall to the next parlor. It didn’t help to brace himself, Jordan knew. The portrait swamped him, as it had the first time he’d seen it.
    The colors, the sheer brilliance of them, the joy and beauty of subject and execution. And the shock of seeing Dana’s body, Dana’s face—Dana’s eyes looking back at him from the canvas.
    The Daughters of Glass .
    They had names, and he knew them now. Niniane, Venora, Kyna. But when he looked at the portrait, he saw them, thought of them as Dana, Malory, and Zoe.
    The world around them was a glory of sunlight and flowers.
    Malory, dressed in a gown of lapis blue, with her rich gold curls spilling nearly to her waist, held a lap harp. Zoe stood, slim and straight in her shimmering green dress, a puppy in her arms, a sword at her hip. Dana, her dark eyes lit with laughter, was gowned in fiery red. She was seated and held a scroll and quill.
    They were a unit in that moment of time, in that jewel-bright world behind the Curtain of Dreams. But it was only a moment, and even then the end was lurking.
    In the deep green of the forest, the shadow of a man. On the silver tiles, the sinuous glide of a snake.
    Far in the background, under the graceful branches of a tree, lovers embraced. Teacher and guard, too wrapped up in each other to sense the danger to their charges.
    And cannily, cleverly hidden in the painting, the three keys. One in the shape of a bird that winged its way through the impossibly blue sky, another reflecting in the water of the fountain behind the daughters, and the third secreted among the branches of the forest.
    He knew Rowena had painted it from memory—and that her memory was long.
    And he