'So little to do you must trouble me here?' she says tartly. 'No wonder we face disaster.'

'Your day would be bereft without a visit from the one who gives your life meaning,' Decebalus replies with a broad grin.

Aula snorts unconvincingly then turns to Mallory. 'She plays in the maze,' she says.

Past clouds of honeybees, Mallory weaves through the heavily scented bushes and eventually sees the top of a young girl's head in the centre of the maze. Virginia Dare never smiles. Occasionally, a heartbreaking, haunted look will appear in the depths of her eyes. In that moment it is possible to comprehend the many atrocities she has witnessed since the Army of the Ten Billion Spiders kidnapped her and her fellow settlers from Roanoke in the New World almost five hundred years ago. She has spent her formative years in the heart of horrors, the Void's Fortress on the edge of the Far Lands, until her escape. Though only eight years old, her eyes say she is a hundred.

'Is it time?' She cradles a doll made for her by one of the kitchen staff who had hoped it would bring back some aspect of childhood.

'Not yet. But soon. I need to ask you if you are prepared to do it.'

'You have asked me twice already.'

'Now I'm asking you a third time.'

'Yes,' she says without hesitation. 'I will travel with you to the Enemy Fortress, and show you the secret way I discovered under the walls.'

'You know what it will mean?'

'You want to protect me, Mallory,' she replies in too-old tones, 'but it is too late for that. I am ruined.'

Mallory cannot look in her face; it makes him too desperately sad.

'She'll be fine.'

Frequently, these days, he never hears Caitlin come up on him. She stands at the entrance to the maze's central rest zone, still slick with sweat, holding her axe loosely. Mallory searches her eyes to see who is in control this time. He doesn't know why he tries, for even when he sees the bright innocence of Amy, there is always the dark of the Morrigan just behind.