Nita went and had a nap immediately. What she had seen had worn her out; and she had been drawn on for general energy assistance during the spell, too, so it was only understandable that she would feel a little wiped out afterwards. When she got up, it was two in the morning. Everything was very still except for a faint clanging sound, soft and repetitive, that wouldn't go away. She had an idea what it might be.

She got up off the ancient bed in the upstairs bedroom Johnny had shown her, and wandered down into the great hall. It was empty now: the spell diagram had been carefully scraped off, and the floor scrubbed. The clanging was closer. She went gently out the front door of the hall and stood there, in the night, listening. Far off on a hill, a sheep went baa. There was a faint hint of light about the far northeastern horizon, an indication that the sun was already thinking about coming up again, and would do so in a couple of hours. If it's like this now, Nita thought, what must it be like around midsummer? It must hardly even get dark at all…

The sound was coming from off to her left. She followed a little path around the edge of the castle towards where the drystone wall ran. The sound of water came chuckling softly up the riverbed beneath it, and the clanging continued, louder.

It was quite dark. She made a small wizard-light to help her go. It sprang out of the air by her, a small silver spark, and lit her way down the rough stone steps that went down towards the water.

The clanging paused, then resumed again. Ahead of her was a small, low building with a rough doorway. There was no door in it, just an opening surrounded by stones. She paused there, and looked in.

The castle's forge was larger than it seemed from outside in the dark. Biddy's steel-walled portable forge had been carried in and set up on one side; her anvil stood in the middle of the floor, on a low stone table there. There was a stone trough, like a watering-trough for horses, off to one side, full of cold water that ran in and out from a channel to the river outside. Something else was there as well; the Ardagh Chalice, sitting all by itself on another stone sill to one side, shining. Its light was quiet at the moment, though it flickered ever so slightly in time with Biddy's hammer blows, when the sparks flew up.

Biddy kept hammering - not a simple single stroke, but a clang-tink, clang-tink, doubled with the rebound of the hammered ingot on the anvil; a sound like a heartbeat, but metallic. Biddy's shirtsleeves were rolled up, and her shirt was soaked with sweat, and sweat stood out on her forehead. Johnny was leaning against a wall, watching; Kit was sitting on the edge of the trough, swinging his legs. He raised his eyebrows at Nita as she came in.

"I couldn't sleep," he said. "Even after I went home. So I came back. My parents think I'm still in bed… it's not a problem."

"What about Dairine?"

"I saw her home. If she needs to come back tomorrow, she can."

"I don't think we'll be needing her any more at this point," said Johnny. "Also I wouldn't like to put all my eggs in one basket. Some of us won't come back from this intervention, and the newer talents like Dairine may be needed for other defences elsewhere if we can't pull this off."

Nita came in close enough to see what Biddy was doing, while at the same time staying out of her way so as not to spoil her concentration. The bar of starsteel had been hammered out into a flat now. As she watched, Biddy paused and picked up the hot steel in her tongs, shoving it back into the furnace. She turned up the feed to the propane bottle, and the steel began to glow cherry-red, and brighter. "When are you going to do it?" she said to Johnny.

He sighed and leaned back. "I think we have to make our move tomorrow. May as well be: it's Lughnasád. A good day for it."

"But you can't have the spells ready by then," Biddy said to him. "You can't possibly. . ."

"They're ready enough," Johnny said. "We can't wait for the poetry of them to be perfect. Brute force and the Treasures are going to have to carry the day… or nothing."

Biddy looked with a critical eye at the steel. It was getting crocus-yellow. She pulled it out hurriedly, put it back on the anvil and began beating it with the hammer in such a way that it folded over. Nita looked at the lines running up and down the length of the spear-blank and realized that she had already done this many, many times. This would strengthen the metal and give it a better edge. "When does the "forging in the fierce spirit" bit start?" Nita said.

Johnny laughed. "Oh, the re-ensoulment? As soon as Biddy's done. Fortunately we don't have to do what the Power that worked with her the first time did, and actually call that spirit out of timeless-ness. It's here already, somewhere. All it needs is to be slipped into this 'body'."

"It seems strange, sometimes," Kit said, leaning back and taking a drink out of a Coke he had with him. "The idea of weapons having souls…"

"Oh, it was common in the older days. It was a rare sword that wouldn't tell you its history when you picked it up: and verbally, not just the way one would do it these days, to a wizard sensitive to such things. That may be our problem today… that our weapons don't nag us any more, or tell us what they think of what we're doing with them… just let themselves be used. But then they take their example from us. And bigger things than just people have lost their spirits, over time; planets, nations…"

Nita looked at him curiously. "Nations have souls?"

"With so much life concentrated in them, how not? You must have seen how certain images, personifications, keep recurring. All our countries have their own "hauntings", good and bad. The bad ones get more press, unfortunately." He shifted against the stone of the wall. "But the good ones keep resurfacing."

Nita looked at the steel, cooling now on the anvil as Biddy rested for a moment. "How much more do you need to fold it?"

Biddy shook her head. "It's had enough. I've done it about thirty times, which means there are about three hundred thousand layers in there already."

"It's not the hardness of the steel itself that's going to make it useful as a weapon," Johnny said, "but you're right; something useful should be beautiful, too. Let me know when you're ready."

"Not too long now," Biddy said. She put the spear-blank in the fire one last time, and turned the gas right up. The length of metal got hotter and hotter, reaching that buttercup-yellow shade again and getting brighter still. She watched the colour critically. "About seven hundred degrees," Biddy said then. "That's all it needs. Kit, you want to move out of the way."

Kit hopped down and went sideways hurriedly as Biddy plucked the steel out of the fire and came past him. It was radiating such heat that Nita could feel it clear across the room by the door. But Biddy seemed not to mind it. To Nita's surprise, Biddy headed not to the water-trough, but straight for the Chalice.

"Straight in," Johnny said.

Nita opened her mouth to say, You're nuts, that won't fit in there! But Biddy, holding the length of metal by one end, eased it straight down into the water-light in the Cup - and in, and in, and in, far past the point where it should have come out the bottom of the Chalice, if the Chalice had been any ordinary kind of vessel. She held the metal there. A roar and a bubbling went up, and the light of the Chalice rose and fell; but none of its contents flowed over the edge, and finally the bubbling died away, and the roaring got quiet. Biddy pulled the metal up and out of it. It was dark again, almost a dark blue on its surface.

"So how exactly are we going to do this, Shaun?" Biddy said, as she laid the metal on the anvil again, and reached for a file.

"Well. All the Dark Power's forays so far have been into our own world - twistings of our reality. We're just a beachhead, of course; it's Timeheart that's really being attacked. It's true, we have some limited success against it here, because we're fighting on our own ground, so to speak. But we can't hope to prosper if we stay merely on the defensive. We'll take it over into the Lone One's reality, into one more central. What happens there will affect what happens here."

"And what will happen here?" Kit said.

Johnny shook his head. "There's going to be a lot more trouble, and it can't be avoided. We'll move as fast as we can, try to finish the battle fast by forcing a fight with Balor immediately. I have a few ideas about how we can do that." He laughed ruefully. "Unfortunately, the only way I can test those ideas out is to try them. If they don't work. . ." He shrugged.

"Then we're no worse off than we were," Nita said, "because the world looks like it's going to pieces at the moment anyway."

johnny laughed softly. "The directness of the young. But you're right." He looked over at Biddy. "Let's finish this first. We can't do anything until it's done."

She had been filing at the length of metal while they talked. The bar was now looking much more like a spearblade and less like a long, flat piece of metal. She was tapering it so that it came to a long, narrow point, then gracefully curved in again. The steel shone, glinting the way Fragarach did - as if it lay in sunshine that the rest of them couldn't see.

Biddy kept working on it, with file and polishing wheel and cloth, and then after about twenty minutes held it up for them to see. "Sloppy but fast," she said. Nita shook her head; she didn't see anything sloppy about it. The flat of the blade gleamed, and the point of it looked deadly, a wicked needle.

"OK," Johnny said. "Let's get it mounted. Then around dawn, we'll finish the job."

"Dawn will be fine. Then what?"

"Then this afternoon we go to war."

" 'We'?"Nita said.

"They'll be coming in this afternoon," Johnny said. "Wizards on active assignment… some just along for the ride, but they live here, and they feel involved. And when everybody's together, we go have us a fight."

He headed off. Biddy was still standing by the anvil, looking at the head of the Spear, her expression very still. She looked up, after a little while, to gaze over at Nita.

"Do you know what I've forged here?" she said.

Nita looked at the spearhead, and found that there were two answers to that question. One of them had something to do with Ronan, and the way he had run from her after she had seen the Champion buried in him the other night. That answer was still partially obscure. But as for the other. . .The edge of the spearhead glinted in the low light, and Nita suddenly saw the way Johnny had written Biddy's name in the circle, and the way it had seemed to cut off short. . .

"Your death," Nita said: or rather the answer spoke itself.

Biddy folded her arms and leaned back against the stone wall of the forge. "I gave up making," she said after a while. "At least, the kind of making that I used to do once. Can you have any idea. . .?" She shook her head, smiling a little: a hopeless look. "What it's like to ensoul your consciousness in a mountain range while it's still molten, and spend a century watching every crystal form? And planning the long slides of strata, the way erosion wears at your work, even the scrape of glaciers. To be what you make… " Biddy sighed. "And to know what it'll become. You can't do that in one of these bodies. And I said I would do so no more, and that I would give myself back to the One sooner. . .”

Nita threw a glance at Kit. She had been there: she knew the sound of the kind of promise that means one thing when you make it… and then later you find that the meaning has changed, but you are going to be held to the promise nonetheless. Or you hold to it…

“And now," Nita said, “ you're making that way again. And you will have to do what you said. Become part of the making, as the Powers do… “ But the Powers existed partly outside of time. One living in time, in a human body, might not find that body working too well after it came back from such an act of making. Nita shivered.

"I may not," Biddy said. But her voice was still full of doubts.

This tone of mind Nita knew as well. Her heart turned over inside her with pity and discomfort. Any advice would sound hollow to someone in Biddy's position, poised between sacrifice and refusal. But Nita thought of how it must have felt to the wizards who had advised her, at one point or another: and they never shirked reminding her of what she needed to do, though their hearts bled from it. It was the basic courtesy one wizard owed another - not to lie. How much more did a wizard owe that courtesy to one of the Powers?

"You can't very well get out of it at this point," Nita said. "Your name in the Speech is bound into the spelling we did yesterday. The name says who and what you are… and for how long." She swallowed. "Change the truth of that now, and the whole spell is ruined. You know that. No Spear… no chance of ensouling it. No chance of saving Ireland."

Not to mention the rest of the world, Nita thought.

But that would hardly seem germane to Biddy at the moment. "Refuse this making," Nita said, "and you'll be part of the destruction of your first one. You of all people should know what to do to keep this island healing, I would have thought."

Biddy looked at her and said nothing.

Nita was immediately mortified. She had completely messed it up. "Sorry," she said,"sorry, never mind, forget I said anything. . ." She went out of the forge hurriedly, feeling completely hopeless and ineffective. Kit came along after her.

He said nothing to her until they were about halfway up to the house. "Sounding a little rattled back there, Neets," Kit said then. "Is there anything. . .?"

"No," she said, and regretted it instantly. "Yes, but you can't do anything. Oh, Kit. . .!" So how do I tell him about last night? About what I saw inside Ronan? And the sight of that cool, sharp metal on the anvil had given her something else to think about. Its image resounded against the image of Ronan in her mind, leaving her with a feeling bizarrely compounded of disaster and triumph. But the resonance was incomplete. It must be finished, something, the Knowledge perhaps, said to her. It has to be fully forged. Otherwise. . .

Nita breathed out. "I can't," she said: and she wasn't even sure who she was saying it to, or about what, any more.

Kit punched her lightly in the arm a couple of times and said nothing.

They went back up to the quiet room together. Dawn wasn't that far away.

"It's not like the last time," Kit said, "or the time before."

The room had big overstuffed chairs in it, and a big glass case full of books. "Look at this," Kit said, reaching up for one. "How to Build Your Own Staircase … " He started leafing through it.

"How do you mean, not like the last time?" Nita said, getting up on the bed and leaning back against the big headboard.

"We've always been doing our stuff pretty much by ourselves," he said. "This is different. We don't have a lot of say about what's going on." Kit looked over at her. "Don't know if I like it."

Nita knew what he meant. "Maybe this is more what it's like for grownups," she said. "I guess this is what it'll be like when we're older. If we survive it."

"You think we might not?" said Kit.

“I don't know. We've been in a lot of situations we thought might kill us. Or that looked bad for part of a continent, part of an ocean…"

"Sometimes part of a universe."

"I know. But this time it just seems more… it seems bigger this time, even though it's smaller. You know what I mean?"

"It means you're away from home.” Kit said. "I feel it too, a little."

Nita yawned. "But among other things," Kit added, "it means that if we get killed, it's not our fault."

"Oh, great," said Nita. "You find the strangest ways to be positive…"

"The only thing I don't understand," Kit said, and then stopped. A moment later he said, "I think we're missing somebody."

"Like who?"

"I don't know. But there's something we're missing."

"Well, I hope you figure out who it is pretty quick," Nita said. "Tomorrow…"

"Today," Kit said.

Nita yawned at him again.

"Neets," Kit said. "What happens if we do die?"

"We get yelled at," Nita said, and then burst out laughing at herself. "I don't know."

“Timeheart?"

"I suppose." She shook her head. "I mean, you know it's going to happen some day… but I don't think I've ever thought it would happen today." She thought a moment, then said, "Well, maybe once or twice. Why? You got a bad feeling?"

"No. That's sort of what worries me. All the times we've been in real big trouble and come through, I've had awful bad feelings. But this time, nothing." He leaned back in the big fat chair and stared at the ceiling. "I keep wondering if that means something…"

Nita looked at him. "Would it be so bad?" she said. "I mean, if you know you're going to die anyway. Might as well go down fighting as die in a bed somewhere, or a car crash or something. It's more useful."

"You sound like Dairine," Kit mumbled.

"Insults," Nita said. "Not very mature of you. I do not."

He fell asleep as she watched him. He had always had a gift for that, except on the night before a wizardry. He was feeling as wiped out as she was, though: or else he considered himself off-duty at the moment. Nita sighed, and leaned back herself…

When she woke up again, it was very suddenly indeed, and with that feeling of having pins stuck into her all over. She swung herself off the bed. Kit was sitting in the chair with his mouth open; she nudged him with her foot. His eyes flew open, and she said, "Kit. . ."

He felt it. He spared himself just time for one long stretch, then bounced up and headed out of the room. "They're doing it. . ."

She followed him around the upper gallery and down a tightly-spiralling staircase in a corner tower of the castle. They came out on the bottom level, peered into the great hall, and saw nothing.

They're out in the forge, Kit said in her head. The pre-dawn stillness was too much for even him to break. Come on. . .

They slipped out the front door: the squeak of it opening seemed as loud as a scream in that great quiet. Nothing spoke; outside, no bird sang; there was only that pale hint of light, high all around in the sky, omnidirectional, bemusing - morning twilight, with thin cloud all over everything, mist clinging low, running along the ground, hanging in wisps and tatters from bushes, hovering over trees.

The top of the dry wall was just visible. Nita and Kit paused by it and looked down to the forge; there was no-one there. Out in the field, Nita said. That way. . .

They turned and made their way through the dew-wet grass, quietly, towards the shadow that lay beneath a nearby oak tree. Ahead of them they heard voices, speaking in unison in the Speech. There was no light, there was no diagram drawn; just four people standing there at the cardinal points of a circle. Struck down into the centre of the circle, on a long shaft, was the Spear. The shaft was very plain: some pale wood - ashwood, maybe. The blade of the Spear, almost a meter long, had been socketed into it and bound with more of the starsteel. Very plain, it was; there it stood, pale shaft, paler blade, with wizards around it, setting up the spell. Nita's aunt stood at one quarter of the circle, Doris Smyth at the second, Johnny at the third. The fourth was wrapped in shadow - tall, thin, wearing a long, dark cloak. Only above the thrown-back hood did anything show: a faint gleam of silver hair, cropped short. Nita swallowed at the sight of it, kept quiet, watching.

The spell was about half-built, to judge by the feeling of anticipation in the air. More than anticipation - it was a sort of insistent calling. Nita's nerves were jangling at the edges with it, even though she knew perfectly well that it wasn't meant for her. Something very powerful was being called, something that lived in her in some small way, and that fragment or fraction was responding.

The long chorus in the Speech went on, the sound of the wizards' voices twining together, building, insistent, demanding that something, some great power should come here, come bind itself, come be in the world, be physical, real as this world counts reality…

Nita listened to them and heard the wizardry begin to fold in on itself: the knot being tied, the insistence growing that something from outside the world, outside time, should wake up, heed the call, come here now! All four voices ended on that tone of command, and the silence fell; and they waited.

Everything waited.

The Spear stood there in the cool light, still as a tree. Nita stood there watching it, holding her breath, not knowing what to expect.

Then it moved. Leaned, ever so slightly, eastward; leaned like a branch of a tree being blown that way in a wind. Leaned further. And it was beginning to make a sound as well. No, Nita thought then. Not making it itself. But the sound was happening around it, a low vibration that sounded like the noise that there ought to be just before an earthquake; a low rumble in the bones and the blood. It wasn't audible. The mind heard it - the fabric of things, the structure of spacetime all around, rumbling, being pushed up from under, or down from above. The feeling of some immense pressure being brought to bear on this spot. . .

She looked at Kit, and with him put her back up against the tree.

The sense of pressure got stronger. And benevolence: that was the strange part. What was coming definitely meant well… maybe a little too well for mortals to bear. It wanted all things healed, everything made well, no matter what pains it cost: everything being put right, straightened, filled. . .Nita held on to the tree as she felt that down-pressing force trying to tamper with her, with the cells of her body, her mind. They resisted, in their dumb way, and so did she, thinking, Leave me the way I am! Leave me alone! I know you want. . .I know. . .

And that was exactly it. It wasn't a pressure, it was a being; not a thing, but a person; not just a person, but a Power. Coming down, here, now, swift to answer the call, fiercer than even Nita had thought, unstoppable now that it had heard the summons - and with a frightful violent strength, because it wasn't bodied, not chained by entropy and the other forces that worked on matter, not yet.

Get in there, she thought, clinging to the tree as if she might be swept away; get in there! The Spear trembled, the blade of it shook on its shaft, a faint creaking sound of the wood betraying the strain as the metal binding tried to break, as the power they had called tried to pour itself into this thing of wood and metal. The metal began to glow, the same cherry-red that Nita had seen in the furnace, getting hotter and realer-looking - more solid and concrete and real than anything in this world should look, as that power pressed down into it.

Expressions were visible now in this light, but the only one Nita could look at, though she could hardly bear to, was Biddy's. Biddy's eyes were fixed desperately on the Spear, as if it were some truth she wanted to see denied; an awful look of anticipation, potentially of horror, was on her face. But there was something else there as well. Plain determination. . .

The metal was golden now, a hot bright gold that didn't bear looking at, and scaling up past it towards white, almost the colour of the star it had come from. White now, that blinding colour of plasma new-plucked from the core. But not just metal any more. Awake, alive, alert and looking; looking at Nita. . .

That light fell on her. She hid her eyes and buried her face against the tree. It was useless. The light struck through everything. No escaping it - it would pierce through you, shake you apart. . .

And then it stopped.

She rubbed her eyes. They were useless for a few moments. Afterimages danced in them. Nita smelled burning. Wincing, squinting, she glanced around her.

The first light of the sun was coming between two hills to the east. It fell on grass that was scorched in a great circle. She could see the little flakes of ash going up from where leaves of the tree had been burned. And in the middle of the circle, where the four wizards stood, something stood and looked back at them. It was shaped like a spear, but this fooled no-one. They knew they were watched, and considered, cheerfully, gravely, by something that would kill any one, or all of them, to do its job -to find the darkness, pierce it, and be its end.

The socket and binding of the Spear had held.

Only the wood of the shaft was scorched black, but it was otherwise sound. Above it, the spearhead stood plain and cool and silvery - but there was something moving in the blade. Those lines of layered metal that Biddy had hammered in, black once, now wavered and twisted: needle-thin lines of fire, white and yellow-white, swirling and writhing in the metal. The air above the Spear wrinkled and wavered the way air does above a hot pavement in the summer, and the ozone smell was thick.

"It's awake," Kit said, softly, as if afraid of being overheard. "It worked…!" And he looked over at Biddy just in time to see her collapse.

They hurried over to her. Nita looked helplessly at Johnny as he came over, hoisted Biddy up. Her eyes were closed: her breathing was so shallow it was hardly to be seen. He shook his head.

"What's wrong with her?" Nita said.

"I'm not sure… We'll take her inside and find out. Meanwhile. . ." He glanced over at the Spear, gleaming crimson where the early sun was catching it. "We're ready," he said. "It's Lughnasád. This evening we move."

She nodded, and looked across the field. Dark in his denims, Ronan was standing there. He had no eyes for anything but the Spear. He was wearing an expression like that of someone who finds something that's lost, something he has been wanting for a long time; something without which he's not complete. It was a frightened look, and a frightening one.

What unnerved Nita even more was the way she could feel the Spear looking back at him. It considered Ronan to be just such a lost object, recovered after a long time, that which completes.

She turned away and did her best to keep her thoughts to herself.

All that day, cars came and went at Matrix: people being dropped off, coming to stay, other people heading out to pick up more people from the train station. The house got full. All the wizards that Nita had seen in the Long Hall were there, and many that she had never seen before. The gravel parking lot in front got full, and people started parking in among the sheep. Everyone had tea. Nita made it several times (as did everyone else). People went out to town for fast food and brought it back, and a lot of baking and cooking went on back in the kitchen; Doris made soda bread seven or eight times, smiling more and more as the compliments got louder. But Nita had noticed that there was a certain desperate quality to a lot of the conversations… the kind of talk meant to keep people from noticing that they themselves were nervous.

The nerves were not just among the less senior wizards, and there were other worries as well. Nita had watched Johnny that morning as he carried the Spear in from the field. He was wincing as he carried it. "Are you all right?" she said to him.

"Yes," he said, and put the Spear down to lean it against the doorpost - hurriedly, Nita thought, and rather gratefully. Johnny rubbed his hands together. "Well, no. It really is hard to hold for even a little while… it burns." He laughed. "It can hardly help it - we went to enough trouble to make it do that! But there's someone else it wants."

"We could all take turns carrying it."

"No, I think it has made its choice. He just has to stop fighting it… " Johnny shook his head. "I think he will."

Nita was confused. "Is there something the matter with it, that it hurts to carry it?"

"The matter? Nothing! The matter's with us, I'm afraid. We called the Spirit of Fire, and we got it -the essence of purification, and triumph… " He trailed off, then said, "It sees the dross in us… and wants to see it burned away, and us made perfect, now. Not possible, of course. It's not easy, meeting one of the cardinal virtues face to face…"

He picked up the Spear again and went off in a hurry.

She could feel it looking at her, though, and she understood now what Johhny had said about some weapons being able to speak. She knew what this one wanted.

She looked over her shoulder and was not even slightly surprised to find Ronan there, looking after Johnny. "Hey, Paddy," she said softly.

"Hey, Miss Yank." But there was none of the good old abrasiveness in his voice now: nothing but soft fear. He was quiet for a moment, and then said, "I hear it calling all the time now. Not just calling me, either. Him."

For a moment Nita wasn't sure what Ronan meant - until the flash of scarlet, of wings or a sword that burned, flickered in her mind's eye. "Oh," she said, and laughed slightly. "Sorry. I usually think of Him as a Her - that's how we saw. . ."

"Her?" Ronan sounded outraged, as if this were one shock too many.

Nita burst out laughing: for the moment, at least, Ronan sounded normal. "Give me a break! As if the Powers care about something like gender. They change names and shapes and sexes and bodies the way we change T-shirts." She rubbed one ear. The One's Champion, in the last shape She commonly wore, had bitten Nita there several times. "Doesn't make Them any less effective on the job."

They wandered off into the field a little way, absently. Nita looked at the scorched place on the ground and veered aside from it.

"He's in there, all right," Ronan said. He sounded like a man admitting he had cancer. "I hear this other voice - not my own. . .He wants the Spear. It's his, from a long way back. Lugh." He coughed slightly: Nita realized then, blushing with embarrassment for him, that he was trying to control the thickening in the throat, the tears. "Why me?" he said softly.

"You're related," Nita said.

He stared at her.

It was true, though: the Knowledge made at least that much plain. "You've got some of His blood," she said, 'from a ways back. You remember what the Queen said, about the Powers dipping in from outside of time, and getting into relationships with people here for one reason or another. So He loved somebody when He was here physically, once. Maybe even as Lugh himself. Does it matter? When He finished the other job he was on, the One gave Him - or Her; whatever - another one. Busy guy. But as soon as He could, He came hunting- a suitable vessel. Like the Spear did." And Nita smiled at him slightly. "Would you rather a blow-in got the job?"

Ronan smiled, but it was a weak smile. After a moment he said, "You knew Him. What's He like?"

She shook her head, not sure how to describe anything to Ronan that that flicker of scarlet across a dark mind didn't convey in itself. "Tough," she said. "Cranky, sometimes. But kind too. Funny, sometimes. Always - very fierce, very. . ." She fumbled for words for a moment. "Very strong, very certain. Very right. . ."

Ronan shook his head. "It's not right for me," he said. "Why don't I get any say in this?"

"But you do," Nita said.

He didn't hear her. "I don't want certainty!" Ronan said softly. "I don't want answers! I don't even know what the questions are yet! Don't I get any time to find things out for myself, before bloody Saint Michael the Archangel or whatever else He's been lately moves in upstairs in my head and starts rearranging the furniture?"

Nita shook her head. "You can throw Him out, all right," she said. "You know what it says. Power will not live long in the unwilling heart. Goes for the Powers, too, I think. But you'd better see what you've got to replace Him with that will be able to use the Spear to cope with Balor, 'cause I can't think of anything offhand."

"If I once let Him run me," Ronan said, bitter in this certainty at least, "He's in to stay."

Nita shook her head. She could think of nothing useful to say.

"Miss tough mouth," Ronan said softly. "Ran out of lines at last. Had to happen eventually."

"If the advice was any good before it ran out," Nita said, halfway between annoyance and affection, "better make the most of it."

Ronan looked away from her, towards the castle. After a moment he headed off that way.

Nita stood and watched him go. A few moments later, Kit said from behind her, "He's a hard case." Nita nodded. "It's a real pain," she said softly.

"What happens if he's right?"

"Just hope he saves everybody in the meantime,"

Kit said.

They went back to being with the many new arrivals. By three o'clock, there were some three hundred wizards there; by eight there were perhaps another two hundred, from all over. “What are all those things they're carrying?" Kit said to Aunt Annie, during one quiet moment outside.

"Johnny told everybody to come armed," Nita's aunt said. They had, though they made a most peculiar-looking army. There were a lot of rakes and shovels. Some people actually had swords, and there were many wands and rods in evidence, of rowan and other woods; there were staves of oak and willow and beech. One wizard, for reasons Nita couldn't begin to guess, was carrying an eggbeater. Another one, a dark-haired sprightly lady that Nita had seen in the Long Hall, had a Viking axe of great beauty and age, and was stalking around looking most intent to use it on something.

" 'It is a great glory of weapons that is in it,' " said a voice down by Nita's foot, " 'borne by the fair-haired and the beautiful; all mannerly they are as young girls, but with the hearts of boon-comrades and the courage of lions; whoever has been with them and parts from them, he is nine days fretting for their company. . .' “

"Tualha," Nita said, bending down to pick her up, "you're really getting off on this, aren't you."

"A bard's place is in battle," Tualha said, perching on Nita's shoulder uncertainly, and digging her claws in. "And a cat-bard's doubly so, for we have an example of fortitude and of boldness and of good heart to set for the rest of you."

Kit looked at her with bemusement. "What would you do in a battle?" he said.

"I would make poems and satires on the enemy," Tualha said,"the way they would curl up and die of shame; and welts would rise up all over them if they did not die straightaway, so that they would wish they were dead from that out. And those that that did not work on. . ." She flexed her claws.

'. . .you'd give them cat-scratch fever," Kit said, and laughed. "Remind me to stay on your good side."

Tualha started scrambling into Nita's rucksack again. "Anne, what about this one?" someone shouted from the castle. Nita's aunt sighed and said, “I'll see you two later."

"Aunt Annie," Nita said, "have you seen Biddy since this morning?"

"Huh? Yes." Her aunt's face looked suddenly pinched.

"She's not any better," Nita said, her heart sinking.

"One of us who's a doctor had a look at her." Aunt Annie shook her head. "The body - well, it's comatose. No surprise. What lived in it has gone elsewhere." She sighed. "It'll wind up in the hospital in Newcastle, I would guess, and hang on a little while before giving up and dying. Bodies tend to do that…"

She shook her head and went off towards the wizard who was calling her.

"Listen," Kit said, "I was supposed to tell you. Johnny wants people to start coming into the big hall," he said, “as many of us as can fit, anyway."

Not everyone could, though they spent a while trying. Many wizards lined the gallery above, or stood and listened in the outer halls and corridors.

Others hung about outside in the parking lot, eavesdropping with their wizardry. Not that the ones closest to the door couldn't hear Johnny anyway. The acoustics in the great hall were very bright, and his sharp voice echoed there as he stood in the centre of the floor, his arms folded.

"We're about ready to go," Johnny said, when the assembled wizards got quiet. "I take it you're all as ready as you can be." The crowd shifted slightly. "I can't tell you a great deal about what to expect, except that we're going into what is, for us, the country of myth… so expect to see even more of the old stories coming true, the legends that have been invading our world over the past few weeks. They'll be real. Just don't forget," and he smiled now,"that we are the myths to them. In the plains of Tethra, we are what they tell stories about, around the fire at night. So don't be afraid to use your wizardry; there aren't any overlays where we're going, or none that matter to what we're doing. At some point we'll be faced by an army. I don't know what it's going to look like. We've seen all kinds of Fomori over here in the last couple of weeks. I don't know how they'll appear on their own ground, but the important thing is not to be fooled by appearances. Anything can look like anything… so feel for essence, and act accordingly. Don't forget that the People of the Hills, and the other nonphysicals who live over on that side, are as much oppressed by the Fomori and Balor as we have been in our world… maybe more so, and whether they actively come to our assistance or not, they're on our side. Be careful not to mistake them for Fomori and take them out. The One is watching. If we go down in this battle, let's do it correctly. Don't get carried away in the excitement of things; remember your Oaths. No destruction that's not necessary." He paused. "One last thing. Most of us will never have been in an intervention this crucial, or this dangerous. The odds against us are extremely high. Some of us," and his glance swept across the group with great unease, "will not come back. It's a certainty. Please, please, please … be careful with your choice. One thing a wizard cannot patch, as you know, is any situation in which his or her own death occurs… so any of you with dependants, or responsibilities which you think may supersede this one, please think about whether you want to cross over. We'll need guardians on this side too, to keep an eye on the worldgate in case the Fomori try to stage a breakthrough behind the main group. Bravery is valuable, but irresponsibility will doom us. Later, if not now. So think."

There was a great silence at this. Nita looked at Kit, and saw him swallow.

"Those of you who need to excuse yourselves, just remain here when we pass through," Johnny said. He turned to Nita's aunt. "Let's open the gate. Anne? This was always one of your specialties. You want to do the honors?" He reached over to the table and handed Nita's aunt the Sword Fragarach.

She took it. A breath of wind went through the hall; the hangings whispered and rustled among themselves. Then Aunt Annie laid it over her shoulder and headed up the narrow spiral stairway to the top of the castle.

The wizards in the hall began to empty out into the graveled parking lot at the front. Nita and Kit went along. Nita was curious to see what would happen. Gatings were an air sorcery; the business of parting the fabric of spacetime was attached to the element of Air, with all those other subtle forces that a wizard could feel but not see. She paused out there in the parking lot and craned her neck.

Against the low golden sunset light, her aunt's silhouette appeared at the top of the tower, between two of the battlements. It was incongruous; a slightly portly lady with her hair tied back, in jeans and trainers and a baggy sweatshirt, lifting up the Sword Fragarach in her two hands. She said, just loud enough to be heard down below, "Let the way be opened."

That was all it took; no complex spelling, not tonight. The barriers between things were worn too thin already. A wind sprang up behind them; light at first, so that the trees merely rustled. Then harder, and leaves began to blow away, and the cypresses down by the water moaned and bent in the wind. Hats blew off; people's clothing tried to jump off them. Nita hugged herself; the wind was cold. Beside her, Kit zipped up his jacket, which was flapping around him like a flag. He stared back into the teeth of the wind. "Here it comes," he said.

Nita turned to look over her shoulder. It looked like a rainstorm coming, the way she had seen them slide along the hills here; the darker kind of light, wispy, trailing from sky to earth, sweeping down on them. Behind it, the landscape darkened, silvered, muted, as if someone had turned the brightness control down on a TV. Everything went vague and soft. The effect swept towards them rapidly, swallowing the edges of the horizon, and then passed over, roiling like a thundercloud. The wind dropped off as it passed.

Everything had gone subdued, quieted; that warm light of sunset now a dull, livid sort of light. The only bright thing to be seen was Fragarach, which had its own ideas about light and shining, and scorned to take the local conditions into account.

Aunt Annie lowered her arms, looked around her, and disappeared from the battlements. Nita glanced around and saw that everything in sight was muted down to this pallid, threatening twilight. The sunset was a shadow, fading away. Overhead was only low cloud and mist; no stars, no Moon.

"That's it," Johnny said. "Someone get the Spear. Doris, the Cup. . ."

"Which way do we go?" said one of the wizards.

"East, towards the sea, and the dawn. Always towards the East. Don't let yourselves get turned around."

Kit looked around. "There are a lot more trees here than there were before…"

"Yeah." The only thing that was about the same was Matrix, which surprised her. She had thought it would take some other shape here, as Sugarloaf had. But it looked like itself; no change. The cars in the parking lot were gone, though, and so was the parking lot itself. There was nothing but longish grass, stretching away to a ride between the trees of the forest and out into a clearing on the far side. It was still a beautiful-looking place, but there was now a grimness about it.

The wizards began moving out. "It was a lot brighter the last time we were here," Nita said to Kit, thinking of Sugarloaf.

He nodded. "They're under attack." So will we be, she heard him think, but not say out loud for fear of unnerving her. Nita laughed softly; she could hardly be much more unnerved than she was at the moment.

Off to one side, Nita caught sight of Aunt Annie, carrying Fragarach. Some way ahead of them, too, they saw Doris Smyth with the Cup, still in its pillowcase. Nita and Kit passed her, and Nita couldn't help looking at the striped pillowcase quizzically. Doris caught the look and smiled. "Can't have it getting scratched," she said. "They'd ask questions when we bring it back."

Nita laughed and turned to say something to Kit, and stopped. Ahead of them she saw Ronan, stalking along in his black jeans and boots and leathers, carrying what looked like a pole wrapped in canvas. Except that she knew perfectly well that it wasn't a pole, since she got the clear feeling that from inside the wrappings, something was looking at her hard. I think he'll stop fighting it, Johnny had said.

"Come on," she said to Kit.

They made their way over to Ronan. "You OK?" Nita said.

Ronan looked at her. "What a daft question. Why shouldn't I be OK?"

"The, uh. . ." Nita almost didn't like to say its name in front of it. "Your friend there. Don't you have trouble carrying it? Johnny was having a really hard time."

"No. Should I? Is the wrapping coming undone?"

"Oh no," Nita said. "Never mind… " But she remembered what Johnny had said about burdens, and cardinal virtues. Either Ronan was just not very sensitive… But no. It couldn't be that. She particularly noticed, though, a slightly glazed look in Ronan's eyes, as if he was seeing something else than the rest of them were seeing; an abstracted expression. Could the Spear make it easier for the person it wanted to carry it, by dulling or numbing their own sense of it?

Or was it something else…?

She shook her head, having no way to work out what was going on, and went on with Kit and all the others through the silvery twilight. It seemed to get a little less gloomy as it went on, though Nita suspected this was just because she was getting used to it. Then the darkness seemed to increase suddenly, and a shadow passed over them. Nita's head jerked up. Something winged and big went by, cawing harshly, as the wizards passed through the space between two tongues of forest.

The bird came to rest on one of the tallest of the trees, and looked down at them. The tree shuddered, and all its leaves fell off it on the spot. The crow laughed harshly. It was one of the grey-backed ones called hoodie-crows; Nita had seen her aunt shoot at them, and swear when she missed, since hoodies attacked lambs during the lambing season, killing them by pecking their eyes out and going straight through their skulls. There was muttering among the crowd as they looked at the crow.

Johnny, up near the front of the group, called, "Well, Scaldcrow? Smell a battle, do you?"

"Have I ever failed to?" said the scratchy, cawing voice; and it was a woman's voice as well, and a nasty one, rich with wicked humour over some private joke. "I see it all red; a fierce, tempestuous fight, and great are its signs; destruction of life, the shattering of shields; wetting of sword-edge, strife and slaughter, the rumbling of war-chariots! Go on then, and let there be sweet bloodshed and the clashing of arms, the sating of ravens, the feeding of crows!" And she laughed again.

"Yes, you would like that part," Johnny said, not sounding particularly impressed. "The rumbling of chariots, indeed! You've been picking up road-kills by the dual carriageway again, Great Queen."

“Go your ways," Doris said, beside Johnny.

“There'll be a battle right enough. But we'll need you at the end, so don't go far."

The crow looked down at them, and the light of the Cup caught in her eyes. She was quiet for a moment, then laughed harshly, and vaulted up out of the tree, flapping off eastward. “I'll tell Him you said so," she said, laughing still, and vanished into the mist.

Nita looked over at Ronan. “Now who was that?”

"It's just the Morrigan," he said.

Nita blanched. "Just!" said Kit. Apparently he had been researching matters in the manual as well. But Ronan just shrugged again.

"She loves to stir up troubles and wars," he said to Kit. "But she can be good, too. She's one of the Powers that can go either way without warning." Nita shivered a little: she saw more than the recitation of myth in his eyes. That dazzled look was about him again, but it was an expression of memory this time. He knew the Morrigan personally, or something looking through his eyes did…

"Well she doesn't look very friendly at the moment," Kit muttered. "I'd just as soon she stayed out of this."

They walked on. Distances seemed oddly telescoped here. The landmarks were the same as they were in the real world, and Nita was seeing already things that had taken them half an hour to reach in the car. She was just pointing Three Rock Mountain out to Kit when they heard the first shouts of surprise from the wizards at the front; and then the first wave of the Fomori hit them.

They ran out at the wizards, screaming, from the shelter of the trees. Nita and Kit, being well off to one side and their view not blocked, had a chance to look the situation over before it got totally incomprehensible. There were a lot of the same kind of drow that they had seen in Bray; some of them were riding black horselike creatures, but fanged like tigers. There were strange headless humanoid creatures with eyes in their chests, and scaly wormlike beasts that flowed along the ground but were a hundred times the size of any snake. That much Nita could make out before the front line of the Fomori smashed in among the leading wizards, and battle broke out.

The wizards counterattacked; spells were shouted, weapons alive with wizard-light struck. And the fight started to be a very uneven one, so much so that Nita was surprised by it. The drows, at least, had seemed much stronger in her own world. But here they went down fairly quickly under the onslaught of the wizards; many of those not directly attacked turned and ran away wailing into the woods, and some of those who had been resisted simply fell down dead after a simple stunning-spell or in the backlash of a stasis or rebound wizardry.

"It's just a feint," said Kit, shaking his head in disbelief. "That can't be the best they've got."

"I hope you're wrong," she muttered.

There were a few moments of confusion while the wizards sorted themselves out.

"Oh, no," Kit said softly. "Not already."

She looked where he was looking. Off to their left a young woman was lying, loose-limbed and pale, like a broken doll thrown down. There were several drows lying in pieces by her, but it was no consolation, seeing they were spattered with that shade of red so bright even in this dim light that it looked fake. Nita shuddered, for experience had shown her over time that this was a sure sign it was the real thing.

"Two more over that way," Kit muttered. "I thought there was supposed to be safety in numbers, Neets."

She shook her head. Two other wizards had gone over to check the young woman: now one of them came back to Johnny, shaking her head.

"They'll have to be left here for now," he said. "We'll see to them later… we can't wait. Come on."

They headed out again.

"It's getting darker," Kit said, looking ahead. "Is that where we're supposed to be going? Downhill there?"

"I think so."

"Great," Kit said. "By the time we get down there, we won't be able to see anything."

That thought had occurred to Nita; it was getting hard enough to see their footing as it was, and since there were no roads here, this was a problem. She had made a small wizard-light to bob along in front of her, like an usher's flashlight in a cinema, to help her see where to put her feet. Meanwhile, she might not be armed with anything concrete, but she had the spell ready that she had used on the drows in Bray. It hadn't functioned too well there, but here, to judge by the reactions of the drows to the wizardries used against them in the skirmish just past, it would work just fine. "You got anything ready to hit things with?" Nita said to Kit.

He looked sideways at her and smiled very slightly. "Well," he said. "There's always the beam-me-up spell. If you just leave the locus specification for the far end of the spell blank - or if you specify somewhere, say, out in deep space. . ."

Nita shuddered. "Yecch."

Kit shrugged. "Better them than me."

The crowd was heading downhill now, on a path paralleling the way the road would have run in the real world, down on to the little twisty ridge of Kilmolin and then further down into Enniskerry village. As they came down there seemed to be some confusion among the front ranks; they were milling around, and the wizards behind were pushing up close behind them.

"Hmf," said the young wizard in the leather jacket, as they came up abreast of him. "Not the best of positions. Look at that." He pointed down the valley. "All strung out like this, if anything should come at us from the sides, it'd break us in two. No, he's doing the right thing, gathering us together. That way if anything happens. . ."

And then it did happen. The Fomori forces came down out of the trees again; they came from both sides in great crowds, hitting the group of wizards in the middle. From where Nita and Kit stood, they could see the crowd being shoved together, in danger of being pinched apart into two groups that couldn't help each other. The fighting broke out in earnest now; flashes of wizard-fire repeating back, a low sound of angry and startled cries beginning to ricochet up the valley. "Here we go," said the young wizard, and he was gone, off down into the press.

Nita looked at Kit and said, "Should we hold off - wait till it gets at us?" And then of course it was at them, as another attacking force hit the group up on the hill from both sides, and everything went crazy.

Nita had a great deal of difficulty remembering the fighting later. The one thing she did remember, rather to her horror, was that she enjoyed it a great deal. It helped a lot, knowing you were on the right side; though several times she wondered, as a drow or one of those black tiger-horse-looking things came at her, whether they knew that they were on the wrong side, and whether it affected their function much. It didn't seem to. Everything turned into a wild confusion of waving arms and hands, shouting, being jostled and bumped. That was the worst of it, really; you could never tell what was going to bump into you, friend or enemy, and it kept you from reacting as quickly to enemies as you might - or else you accidentally hit a friend. Several times Nita was aware of not-so-accidentally elbowing other wizards, just in case they were something that was about to attack her; better to throw them a little off balance than to take the chance - and then of course you were embarrassed afterwards. She did it to Kit once, knocking him right over, and was mortified.

The other problem was the screaming. At the time it didn't bother her particularly; later on she found herself wondering whether she had been watching much too much television. It all seemed remote, like something in the crowd scene from a film. Nita remembered one moment with particular clarity, of seeing a drow come at her, and saying the spell that had not worked in Main Street in Bray, and seeing the spell then work entirely too well as the thing exploded in fragments and splinters of stone that bled hot, and splattered her with ichor that burnt like drops of lava. Her wizard's shield took most of it, but a few drops got through, probably because she was distracted, and burnt right through her clothes to the skin.

She wasn't able to keep track of what Kit was doing; but for those strange few minutes, she didn't really care. She had her hands full. The screaming sounds from all sides got louder, as beasts of the Fomor kind came at wizards to savage them, sometimes missing, sometimes succeeding. Nita killed another drow, and stumbled over something, someone, she saw in shock as she recovered her balance. A young man's body, mangled like something out of a horror film. She staggered away, shaking all over with exertion and fear. One wizard went by her staggering and white-faced with shock and blood loss, one arm so badly torn that it seemed barely to be hanging by a string from the shoulder. Another wizard, a young woman in jeans and a sweatshirt, hurried to help, and carried him away. What happens to him now? Nita thought, in one lull when the fighting seemed to be happening somewhere else, and she had lost sight of Kit. What happens if you die when you're not in the real world? Where does your soul go? Does it know where to go when you die? But it seemed unwise to push that issue too far.

After a long while, there came another lull. Nita looked down the hill and saw nothing but human wizards, milling around; there seemed to be no more drows, no more of the horse-things; just quiet. A lot of wizards, maybe five percent of the whole group, had been hurt, and were sitting or lying down on the ground while others tended to them. She didn't feel so wonderful herself; she sat down to rest on a log under the eaves of the forest, gasping for air, while Tualha put her head out of the rucksack and looked around. She tried hard not to look at the fifteen or twenty dark shapes on the ground, wizards who were not being tended.

After a little while, Kit found her. His clothes were spattered with burn-holes, apparently from the same kind of hot lava-blood that lived in the drows, and he was limping as he came towards her. Nita staggered to her feet at the sight of him; but he shook his head and waved at her. "No, it's OK. I just twisted it."

"Well, come here, you can't just walk on it like that, it'll get worse. You won't be able to run anywhere if you have to."

He sat down on the log beside her. "Your specialty."

She nodded; she had always had a knack for the mending and healing spells for either animate or inanimate objects. Spells for the living always required the wizard's own blood, but there was no shortage of that; Nita had bashed herself pretty thoroughly while getting loose from one drow that had caught hold of her. Now the memory made her shiver: but at the time it had seemed simply an annoyance, and had made her angrier. She had blown that drow up while it was still holding her. . .

Nita shook her head and set to work. She spent five minutes or so working on Kit's leg. It was a strained tendon, and she talked it out of the strain and gave it the equivalent of several days' rest in several minutes. The spell seemed to come harder to her than usual, though, and at the end of it Nita was panting even harder than she had been from the sheer exertion of the battle. "It's not right," she said to Kit when she got her breath back. "It shouldn't take that much energy."

Kit was looking vaguely gloomy. "I think that's the catch," he said. "Wizardry works better here, but it takes more out of us - we can do less of it." He shook his head. "We'd better get this over with fast. In a few hours we won't be worth much."

She was too nervous to sit there much longer. Nita got up and dusted herself off. "Have you seen my aunt?" she said.

"She was down in front with Johnny, last I saw her. That was before the fighting started, though."

“Tualha, you any good at finding people? There's quite a crowd down there."

“In this case it won't be hard. I should look for Fragarach's light, or the Cup's."

It was as good a hint as any. After about twenty minutes' walking they found her, and Tualha had been right; she was with Doris Smyth, and it was the blue-green fire of the Cup that gave their presence away. Doris was working with one of the more seriously wounded people. Two of the larger and more muscular wizards were easing a young woman with a torn leg down into the Cup. She seemed no smaller than she should have been, and the Cup seemed no larger; but nevertheless the woman was lost from the waist down in that cool light, and a few moments later, when the other wizards helped her to her feet again, the leg was whole.

Doris was looking wobbly. “I'll not be doing much more of this," she said to Nita's aunt. 'The Cup's able enough for it, but it's just a tool; it can't work by itself without someone to tell it what to do. And neither I nor anyone else will be able to keep doing this again and again - not here. Not today." She looked over at Nita and Kit as if seeing them there for the first time, and her face was very distressed. “Away with you out of here," she said, “you shouldn't be seeing things like this at your age." And she turned her attention away to another hurt wizard who was being brought over.

Nita looked over at Kit; his expression was wry, and a little sad. He motioned Nita over to one side, where her aunt was looking nearly as pale as Doris. “You OK, Aunt Annie?" Nita said, anxious.

Her aunt nodded. "What about you?"

Nita's aunt was wearing an understandably preoccupied expression. She was looking off down the hillside, towards the place where Enniskerry would have been, and past it. "It's awfully dark down there," she said softly.

Nita looked down the slope, past where the valley fell away along either side of the thirteen-bend road. Down where Bray and Shankill should have been, there was a wall of blackness, so opaque as to seem nearly solid. It gave Nita a bad feeling just looking at it.

"Something's on the other side of that," Kit said. "And it's watching us."

Her aunt looked at Nita regretfully. "I'm beginning to wish I'd left you at home."

"You couldn't have. I would have found a way to come along, and you know it."

Her aunt suddenly reached out and hugged her. "Don't do anything stupid," she said.

"Anne," Johnny said from one side. "Can I have a word?"

Feeling slightly embarrassed, Nita brushed herself off, and was a little amused to see her aunt doing the same thing. "Look," Johnny said, "we can't have another set-to like that. Too many people got killed." It was then that Nita noticed the tears running down his face, incongruous when taken together with his calm voice. "I think we're going to have to play our aces a little early," Johnny continued.

Nita's aunt hefted Fragarach. Or was it the sword itself that lifted eagerly in her hand? Nita had a hard time telling the difference. "If we use them too early," her aunt said slowly, "we won't have them for later. You've seen the way wizardry is behaving here."

"That's precisely the problem. First of all, these three Treasures were never much good against Balor the last time. And secondly, if we're all killed or driven off by his creatures before we get to him -or if they delay us past the point where our wizardry, or even that of the Treasures, still works, then all of this will have been for nothing. I want you to use Fragarach on the next lot - because they're out there waiting for us, under cover of those next two patches of woodland. If we get hit again after that, Doris will use the Cup. And I can use the Stone the same way, if there's need." He paused and looked at her. "Something wrong? You look a little pale."

She shook her head. "Shaun," she said, "I just don't know if I can do this."

"Not lack of power, surely."

"Oh, no. It's just. . .” She held Fragarach up. "Shaun, we speak so lightly of "re-ensouling" these things. The trouble is, it worked. There's a soul in this, and an intelligence and a will - one much older and stronger than mine, one that considers me mainly a form of transportation. Once I actually start to use it. . ." She laughed a little. "It's a good question which is going to be the tool and which the user. I don't know how much of me is going to be left afterwards; even now I can feel it pushing, pushing at my mind all the time. I don't know if you get the same sense down your rapport with the Stone - it's Earth, after all, and mostly passive. But if Air, the lightest and most malleable of the Elements, behaves this way. . ." She shook her head. "And what about Fire, then? I have some experience, some ability to resist. But what's going to come of that poor child? What happens when the Power that comes with the Spear puts forth Its full force. . .?"

She mentioned no names. Johnny shook his head. "Anne," he said, "we'd better just hope that it does; otherwise we're lost. Meanwhile, can you do your part? If not, I'll look around for someone else. But you do have the rapport."

She looked at him. “I'll manage," she said.

Johnny headed off. "Get yourselves together," he said to the wizards he passed. "We're moving out, and the Fomori are going to come after us again."

Nita's aunt went after him. Nita watched her go, and stood thinking a moment about Ronan. He doesn't have her experience, she thought. But he has the power.

Not as much, she heard Kit thinking. Not as much as he might if he were younger… What's this going to do to him?

She glanced over at Kit, unnerved. They tended not to hear each other thinking that much any more: but evidently this otherworld had more effects than on merely active wizardry.

And the shout went up from down the slope. Nita saw the mass of dark forms come charging down at the wizards, out of the trees again.

There were a few more moments of confusion, milling around, screams. Then Kit grabbed her arm, and pointed. Down the slope, she saw it, the upraised little line of red light that grew from a spark to a tongue of fire, and from a tongue to a lance of it that arrowed up into the threatening sky. The wind began to rise behind them, moaning softly, then louder, a chorus of voices in the trees, uncertain at first, then threatening themselves, long howls of rage; and the wind rose and rose, bending the trees down before it, whipping leaves and dirt through the air so that it became hard to see. The wizards staggered against the blast of it, but even as she fought to stay upright, Nita had a feeling that the wind was avoiding her, and the threat in it was for someone else. . .

She and Kit headed downhill, because that was the way the wind was pushing them; but the great mass of wizards were pushing down that way too, their cries mingling with the wind's. The two fronts of Fomori that had struck them from either side were staggering back and away, further down the slope, blown that way, forced down by the raging wind that blew them over and over, that dropped trees on them and tossed logs from the wood after them like matchsticks. The Fomori were almost at the bottom of the hill now, into the little dell where Enniskerry village would have stood. There was no bridge over the Glencree River, in this world; they would have to ford it. The wizards and the relentless wind pushed them down into the dell. . .

The wind rose to a scream, then; and there were more sounds in it than screams. An odd sound of bells, that Nita recognized; and the sound of hooves, like glass ringing on metal. Nita looked up and saw what few mortals have seen and lived afterward: the Sluagh Ron, the Dark Ride of the Sidhe. In our time the People of the Hills leave their anger at home when they ride - their day is done, and their angers are a matter of the songs their bards sing to while away the endless afternoon. But that afternoon was broken, now, and the legendary past had come haunting them as surely as it had come after the mortals. The Sidhe rode in anger now, as the People of the Air, in the whirlwind, with a clashing of spears that shone with the pale fire that flickers around the faery hills on haunted nights. Their horses burnt bright and dark as stormclouds with the sun behind them as they came galloping down the air. There was no more chance of telling how many of the riders there were than there was of counting the raindrops in a downpour. But two forms stood out at the head of them: the Queen with her wild hair flying, on a steed like night, and the Fool on one like stormy morning, with their spears in their hands and a wind and a light of madness about them.

At the sight of them, a great shriek of despair and terror went up from the Fomori. The Sidhe cried out in answer, a cry of such pure delighted rage that Nita shuddered at the sound of it, and the Sluagh Ron hit the great crowd of Fomori from the southward side. The wizards parted left and right to let them through, and the Sidhe drove the Fomori straight downward into the Glencree ford, and up against the ridge on the far side. Wailing the Fomori went, and the press of riders and the darkness borne on the wind hid them from sight.

After what seemed a very long while, the wind died down, leaving the riders standing there, and the wizards looking at them, among the dead bodies of Fomori, and the twitching, witless ones, driven mad by the sight of the onslaught. Johnny went from where he had been talking to Nita's aunt, who held a Fragarach much darnped-down and diminished-looking, and stood by the tallest of the riders, taking the bridle of her horse. "Madam," he said, "we hadn't looked to see you here."

"We were called by our own element," the Queen said, looking down at Nita's aunt, and Fragarach. "Besides, it has been too long since I went foraying; and since our world seems like enough to die here, this is a good time to ride out again. We have not done badly. But I think we may not be able to do much more. All magics are diminishing in the face of our enemy's draoiceacht, and I feel the weariness in my bones. Do not you?"

Johnny nodded. "Nevertheless we will press on," he said.

"We will go with you and look on this ending," said the Amadaun; and paused. "If an ending is indeed what we are coming to."

"One way or another," Johnny said.