my

this time the flash of white teeth was like an icy wind that sent a chill through Bahzell's bones. He saw the remembered bleakness in her dark eyes, still and blue as deep ocean water in that moment, and he understood. Lillinara was the patron of all women—the laughing maiden, the loving mother . . . and the avenger.
"But then I realized something," Kaeritha said softly. "Something Seldan and Marja and Mistress Sherath and Dame Chaerwyn had been trying to teach me for almost six years." She leaned back in her chair and looked not at Bahzell, but at Sir Yorhus.
"Vengeance is a poison," she said in that same soft voice, "and vengeance was what I wanted from the Sisterhood. I wanted the Silver Lady to accept my sword so that I could use that sword on the men who'd turned my mother into a whore and tried to do the same to me, and it didn't matter at all that those men were all back in Moretz. Any man who transgressed in any way against any woman would have done for me, because I didn't want justice. I wanted an excuse."
Yorhus twitched, and then his eyes fell, as if unable to bear her gaze. She continued to look at him for several moments, then shrugged and turned back to Bahzell.
"I realized that even if the Sisterhood had been willing to accept my oath—and I'm not at all sure they would have—I would have given it for the wrong reasons. Yet I also knew that what had happened to my father, my mother, my sister and my brother—and to me—would happen to others, again and again. That it would go right on happening until someone made it stop, and that was what should truly be important to me: making it stop whenever and wherever I could. Not avenging myself on men who hadn't had a thing to do with what happened to me, whatever they might have done to someone else, but keeping those same things from happening to others and in administering justice, not vengeance, when o