Crimson flashed overhead. The nredrake. No--even as she looked up the firedrake halted and hung in the gray sky above her: the red ^ar. If a meteor was a harbinger of royal death, then ^at might the star foretell?

178 * mark anthony Fear filled her. There wasn't much time. She reached a hand toward Travis and called to him, even though she knew it was futile, that the mist would encapsulate her words as she shouted them, that he would nothear her.

"Travis!"

This time he turned around.

It was Travis just as she had remembered him, wearing the same baggy green tunic, his sandy hair and beard still shaggy and wild. A thrill coursed through her. He had heard her! She started to call out again, to warn him that he was in terrible danger.

The words died on her tongue. The elation in her chest was replaced by damp fog.

Behind his wire-rimmed spectacles, Travis's eyes were completely black.

There were no whites, no irises. Only empty, borderless pupils. Tendrils of mist circled around him. Except it wasn't mist, she saw now. It was smoke, and it was rising from his clothes.

He smiled at her. Then Grace screamed as the mist went red and fire leaped up to consume them both.

Grace sat up in bed, pushed snarled hair from her face, then fumbled in 183 the dark for the top of the ladder. She climbed down to the floor.

Coals still glowed on the hearth, guiding her like red beacons. She took a splinter of wood from a jar, held the tip against a coal, then guarded the resulting flame with a curled hand until she transferred it to a candle on the room's table.

The borders of night retreated to the corners of the room. Grace sat in a chair, folded hands in her lap, and stared at the candle, letting the mundane light fill npr vision Slip was sweating--the heat nf the dream 1 79.

still--but she shivered in her underclothes all the 1 same. The image of Travis and his black eyes would not leave her mind.

It was just a dream. Grace. A bunch of synoptic vomit, that's all.

Besides, even if Travis is in trouble, it's not as if he's anywhere you could reach him.

Logic dulled her fear. Travis was on Earth now. Of course, there were plenty of dangers there--drunken drivers, crashing jetliners, rapidly mutating jungle viruses with no vaccines--but at least they were familiar to her. And perhaps it was a good thing Travis was a world away. Because if he were on Eidh again, Grace suspected he might find himself in a far different kind of peril.

She still wasn't certain--not completely. It had been impossible, as always, to get definitive answers from either Ivalaine or Tressa while the two were here, and it was a topic Lirith had been flatly unwilling to discuss since her arrival. But all the evidence was there. Tressa had been both shocked and fascinated when he broke the rune of peace bound into the council table. Runebreaker, she had whispered. And Kyrene, well into her mad descent after being cast from Ivalaine's favor, had approached him. Clearly she had thought that casting him under her spell would win her favor again among the Witches. But why were the Witchesinterested in Travis Wilder?

Grace didn't know, but while Ivalaine was always an enigma, she had let one clue slip the day she had inquired about Grace's relationship with Travis.

184.

Why do you wish to know, Your Majesty Grace had dared to ask. Do you think he might be the Runebreakerf The queen's ice-blue eyes had narrowed. Where ^d you hear that word, sisteri Tressa said it at the council.

AJ't'PT d 1i"fnn- cil^-nr'o Tiril -3irn= rxin c-rt^-tb-o-n T'T-i/3 rnr> 180 ' mark anthony called Runebreaker is a great evil, sister. And like all evil this one can wear many masks, some ugly, some fair. But if we are lucky his evil will not come to pass as has been foretold. That is enough for you to know.

It hadn't been much, but it had been enough to confirm Grace's suspicions. Whoever this Runebreaker was, he was a concern of the Witches, and as a result they were interested in all who had the power to break runes. Which, from what Falken had told her, was a list of people that contained a single name: Travis Wilder.

But Travis was hardly a great evil. Whatever the queen said about masks, Travis had saved this world on Midwinter's Eve, not harmed it. Grace pushed herself up from the table and turned to pour herself a cup of wine. Maybe it would calm her enough so she could sleep again.

Self-medicating, are we, Doctor^ She ignored the thought, sloshed some wine into a goblet, hesitated, then filled the vessel to the rim. Regardless of what the Witches were up to, Travis was far beyond their reach. She lifted the cup to drink.

The goblet halted an inch from her lips. Outside the window, just beneath the slender crescent of the waning, almost-new moon, shone the red star. It stared back at her from the night like a crimson eye. If only there were a way to glimpse him--just for a second, just to make sure he wasn't in peril.

185.

But there was a way, and she knew it.

Don't be an idiot. Grace. The last time you tried it you just about turned yourself into a vegetable. And this time Ivalaine is not here to rescue stupid beginner witches who get themselves into trouble. Even as she thought this, she set down the cup, moved to the mantelpiece, and drew an object from +ltQ 1 ctrt'nrl-> fiirriT*- 181It glittered on her hand in the candlelight: the silver half-coin Brother Cy had given her back on Earth. Wherever he was, Travis had the other half.

She returned to the chair. Once before she had used the Touch to descry, not a living thing, but an object. It had been a knife, and the spell had taken her to the circle of stones south of the castle. There she had watched, bodiless, as Logren and Alerain plotted to murder one of the rulers at the Council of Kings. The experience had been remarkable, but she nearly had been lost in it, and she would have been had not Ivalaine called her back.

She gripped the half-coin in her hand and gazed into the heart of the candle's flame.

This is pointless. Travis is fine. You'll probably see him sleeping, or eating a bowl of cereal, or sitting on the toilet. Or more likely you'll see nothing at all. You haven't been able to Touch the Weirding once without it all falling apart, not since Garf died. What makes you think you can do thisi Except she knew she could, knew it was different, that touching the Weirding--the vibrant web of life that wove itself among all living things--was something beyond her just then. But this, an inanimate object, a thing of cold, hard, lifeless metal--this was something she 186 could touch.

You should at least tell Lirith what you're doing.

But she did not rise from the chair. Instead, she shut her eyes, Ie; the darkness fill her, and reached out with her mind to touch the half-coin.

This time she felt it--almost like a tug, followed by a wet sensation of parting.

Then she was flying.

By the time she gathered her wits enough to look down, the ground was already far below: a textured canvas painted in blue tones of shadow.

She glanced back--dimly noticing that this action required only a tnOUPnt nnt T-n/-1-irn__l-nrl ^nnlrl met- T-mr^lir tm^l- rn+182 '

mark anth ony Calavere from the backdrop of stars. Only here and there did the spark of a torch flicker against the night. The town at the foot of the castle's hill was no brighter, and of the villages she knew dotted the landscape around the castle, Grace could see no trace. The darkness was complete. It was utterly unlike being in a jet above North America at night, when one could look out the window and see the cities like glittering jewels strung along the gleaming strands of the highways.

Except this was no airplane she rode in. Right now her body sat slumped in a chair in a room in Calavere while the rest of her sped toward a destination she did not know.

A broad, black serpent undulated below her, its curves catching the faint light of the moon: the River Darkwine. Grace thought back to her fireside geography lessons with Aryn. Didn't the Dimduorn flow east from Calavere to the marches of Toloria? Yes, she could still recall the charcoal map Aryn had drawn. Once it reached Toloria, the Dimduornturned south, and a smaller river flowed into it. Just east of the confluence Aryn had placed a dot: Ar-tolor, the seat of Queen Ivalaine of Toloria.

Ar-tolor? Was that where she was going?

187.

She forced her attention down, and even as she did she saw the great river curve sharply to her right. At the bend, nearly as Aryn had drawn it, a lesser river joined the Darkwine. Just beyond was a pale shape on a hill. Slender towers reached toward the sky and, unlike in Calavere, fires danced atop all seven of them. So the Witch Queen at least dared to defy the night.

Grace expected her descent to begin, but instead she seemed to move faster yet. Ar-tolor slipped past and was gone. Land flowed beneath her like dim water. Then jagged shapes heaved up before her, taking a v^irrrrdA hi * ft /-*n + *-*f 4-htn o