“I just assumed it was my mother who’d sent for me.”

“Suhuy was certain she would — which is why he wanted to reach you first. What I have told you concerning your father’s Pattern is not yet common knowledge.”

“What am I supposed to do about it?”

“He did not entrust me with that information.”

The star grew brighter. The sky was filled with splashes of orange and pink. Shortly, lines of green light joined them, and they swirled like streamers about us.

We raced on, and the configurations came to dominate the sky fully, like a psychedelic parasol rotating slowly. The landscape became a total blur. I felt as if a part of me dozed, though I am certain I did not lose consciousness. Time seemed to be playing games with my metabolism. I grew enormously hungry and my eyes ached.

The star brightened. Gryll’s wings took on a prismatic shimmer. We seemed to be moving at an incredible pace now.

Our strand curved upward at its outer edges. The process continued as we advanced until it seemed we were moving in a trough. Then they met overhead, and it was as if we sped down a gun barrel, aimed at the blue-white star.

“Anything else you’re supposed to tell me?”

“Not so far as I know.”

I rubbed my left wrist, feeling as if something should have been pulsing there. Oh, yes. Frakir. Where was Frakir, anyway? Then I recalled leaving her behind in Brand’s apartment. Why had I done that? I — my mind felt cloudy, the memory dreamlike.

This was the first time since the event that I had examined that memory. Had I looked earlier I would have known sooner what it meant. It was the clouding effect of glamor. I had walked into a spell back in Brand’s apartment. I’d no way of knowing whether it had been specific to me or merely something I’d activated in poking about. It could, I supposed, even have been something more general, enlivened by the disaster — possibly even an unintentional side effect of something that had been disturbed. Somehow I doubted the latter, however.