THE AWFUL TRUTH

It started hesitantly, one cheer of victory among a sea of doubting and skeptical expressions. For those outside of Spirit Soaring, the dwarves on the ground and the wizards and priests fighting from the balconies and rooftops, they saw only that single image of the great dracolich dematerializing before their astonished eyes, fading to seeming nothingness under the brilliant light of Cadderly's conjured sun.

It was gone, of that they were all certain, and the assault of its minions had also ended with the disappearance of the great wyrm. The wizards didn't even bother sending magical bolts out at the retreating hordes, so intent were they on the empty spot where the dracolich had been.

Then that one cheer became a chorus of absolute relief. Clapping, whistling, and shouting with joy, they moved toward the spot where the beast had departed the field as if pulled by gravity.

The cheers grew louder, shouts of joy and hope. Wizards proclaimed that the Weave itself would mend. Priests cried out in joy that they would once more be able to speak with their gods. Cheers for Cadderly rolled across the walls, some proclaiming him a god, a deity who could bring the sun itself to bear on his enemies. "All fear Cadderly!"

But that was outside Spirit Soaring. That euphoria was for those who could not hear Catti-brie screaming.

With magical anklets speeding his strides, Drizzt outpaced Cadderly, Danica, and even Bruenor, desperate as the dwarf king was to reach his daughter. The drow scrambled through the corridors, leaped a banister to the fifth step of a rising staircase, and sprinted up to the third floor three steps at a time. He banged against walls so he didn't have to slow in his turns down the side corridors, and when he came to her door, Jarlaxle's eye patch in hand, along with his divinely weighted scimitar, he shouldered right through it.

Jarlaxle was waiting for him, though how the mercenary had beaten him to the room, Drizzt could not fathom and didn't have time to consider.

Catti-brie huddled against the back wall, screaming no more, but trembling with abject terror. She shielded her face with upraised arms, and between those intervening limbs, Drizzt could see that her white eyes were wide indeed.

He leaped toward her, but Jarlaxle caught him and tugged him back. "The patch!" Jarlaxle warned.

Drizzt had enough of his senses remaining to pause for a moment and don the enchanted eye patch, dropping Icingdeath to the floor in the process. He went to his beloved and enveloped her, wrapping her in a great hug and trying to calm her.

Catti-brie seemed no less frightened when the other three arrived a few heartbeats later.

"What's it about?" Bruenor demanded of both Cadderly and Jarlaxle.

Jarlaxle had his suspicions and started to answer, but he bit his response off short and shook his head. In truth, he had no real evidence, nor did Cadderly, and they all looked to Drizzt, whose eye - the one not covered by the patch - like his wife's, had gone wide with horror.
* * * * *

They had not destroyed the Ghost King - that much was obvious to Drizzt as he hugged Catti-brie close and slipped into the pit of despair that had become her prison.

Her eyes looked into that alien world. He, briefly, resided in a gray shadow of the world around him, mountainous terrain to mimic the Snowflakes, in the Shadowfell.

The Ghost King was there.

On the plain before Catti-brie, the dracolich thrashed and roared in defiance and pain. Its bones shone whiter, its skin, where the scales had fallen away, showed an angry red mottled by great blisters. Seared by holy light, the beast seemed out of its mind with pain and rage, and though he had just faced it in battle, Drizzt could not imagine standing before it at that horrible time.

Cadderly had stung the beast profoundly, but Drizzt could easily recognize that the wounds would not prove mortal. Already the beast seemed on the mend, and that act of reconstitution was the most terrifying of all.

The beast reared up in all of its fiendish glory, and it began to turn, faster and faster, and from its spinning form emanated shadows, like demonic arms of darkness. They reached across the plain, grasping scrambling crawlers, who shrieked, but only once, then fell dead.

Drizzt had never witnessed anything like it, and he concentrated on only a small portion of the spectacle. For the sake of his own sanity, he had to keep his emotional and mental distance from the conduit that was Catti-brie.

The Ghost King was leaching the life energy out of anything it could reach, was stealing the life-force from the crawlers and using that energy to mend its considerable wounds.

Drizzt knew that the monster would recover fully, and soon. Then the Ghost King would return to Spirit Soaring.

With great effort and greater remorse, the drow pulled himself away from his beloved wife. He couldn't comfort her. She felt not at all his embrace, and heard not at all his gentle calls.

He had to return to his companions. He had to warn them. Finally, he managed to let go, then broke the mental link to Catti-brie. The effort left him so drained that he collapsed on the floor of the room.

He felt strong hands grab him and hoist him upright, then guide him to sit on the edge of the small bed.

Drizzt opened his eyes, pulling back the eye patch.

"Bah, but another of her fits?" said Athrogate, who had just come to the door, Thibbledorf Pwent beside him.

"No," answered Cadderly, who stared at Drizzt. All eyes went to the priest, and many of them, Danica most of all, gasped in surprise at the sight of the man.

He wasn't young any more.

For years, it had taken first-time visitors to Spirit Soaring considerable effort to reconcile the appearance of Cadderly Bonaduce, the accomplished and venerable priest whose remarkable exploits stretched back two decades, for he appeared as young as his own children. But before the disbelieving stares of the three dwarves, two drow, and his wife, that youth had dissipated.

Cadderly looked at least middle-aged, and more. His skin sagged, his shoulders slumped a bit, and his muscles thinned even as the others stood gawking. He looked older than Danica, older than he was, nearer to sixty than to fifty.

"Cadderly," Danica gasped. He managed a smile back at her and held his hand up to keep her and the others at bay.

He seemed to stabilize, and he appeared as a man in his fifties, not much older than his actual age.

"Humans," Athrogate snorted.

"The magic of the cathedral," Jarlaxle said. "The wounded cathedral."

"What do you know?" Danica snapped at the drow mercenary.

"The truth," said Cadderly, and Danica turned to him, approached him, and he allowed her a hug. "My youth, my health - are wound within the walls of Spirit Soaring," he explained to them. "The beast wounded it - wounded us!" He gave a helpless little laugh. "And surely wounded me."

"We will fix it," Danica breathlessly promised.

But Cadderly shook his head. "It isn't a matter of wood and nails and stone," he said.

"Then Deneir will fix it with you," Jarlaxle said, drawing curious stares with his unexpected compassion.

Cadderly started to shake his head, then looked at the drow and nodded, for it was no time for any expression of pessimism.

"But first we must ready ourselves for the return of the Ghost King," Jarlaxle remarked, and he led everyone's gaze to Drizzt Do'Urden, who sat on the bed staring helplessly at Catti-brie.

"What's she seeing, elf?" Athrogate demanded. "What memory this time?"

"No memory," Drizzt whispered. He could hardly even find his voice. "She cowers before the raging Ghost King."

"In the Shadowfell," Cadderly reasoned, and Drizzt nodded.

"It is there, in all its fury, and there it heals its wounds," the drow said, looking so pitifully, so helplessly, at his lost and terrified wife. He couldn't reach her. He couldn't help her. He could only look on and pray that somehow Catti-brie would find her way out of darkness.

For a fleeting moment, it occurred to Drizzt Do'Urden that his wife might truly be better off dead, for it seemed that her torment might have no end. He thought back to that quiet morning on the road from Silverymoon when, despite the troubles with the ways of magic, all had seemed so right in his world, beside the woman he loved. It had been only a matter of tendays since that falling magical strand had descended upon Catti-brie and had taken her from Drizzt, but to him, sitting on that bed, so near and yet so distant from his wife, it truly seemed a lifetime ago.

All of that pain and confusion showed on his face, he realized, when he looked at his companions. Bruenor stood in the doorway, trembling with rage, tears streaking his hairy cheeks, his strong fists balled at his sides so tightly that his grip could have crushed stone. He studied Danica, so troubled by her own spouse's dilemma, still taking the time to alternate her gaze between Cadderly, whom she stood beside, and Drizzt, and with equal sympathy and fear showing for both.

Jarlaxle put a hand on Drizzt's shoulder. "If there's a way to get her back, we will find it," he promised, and Drizzt knew he meant every word. When Drizzt looked past him to Bruenor, he recognized that the dwarf understood Jarlaxle's sincerity.

But both also knew that it wouldn't do any good.

"It heals, and it will return," Cadderly said. "We must prepare, and quickly."

"To what end?" asked a voice from the hallway, and they all turned to see Ginance and the others standing there. The speaker, a wizard, held one arm in close, for his robe's sleeve had fallen to tatters and the arm underneath it had withered to dried skin and bone. One of the dracolich's tail swipes had touched him there.

"If we defeat it again, will it not simply retreat once more to this other world of which you speak?" Ginance asked. Cadderly winced at the devastating question from his normally optimistic assistant.

Everyone understood Cadderly's grimace, particularly Drizzt, for the simple truth of Ginance's remark could not be denied. How could they defeat a beast who could so readily retreat, and so easily heal, as Drizzt had witnessed when he had hugged Catti-brie?

"We will find a way," Cadderly promised. "Before Spirit Soaring, in the old structure that was the Edificant Library, we fought a vampire. That creature, too, could run from the field if the battle turned badly. But we found a way."

"Aye, yer dwarfs sucked the gassy thing into a bellows!" howled Thibbledorf Pwent, who had made Ivan Bouldershoulder tell him that story over and over again during the time Ivan and Pikel had spent at Mithral Hall. "And spat him out into a running stream under the sunshine!"

"What're ye saying?" Athrogate demanded, his eyes wide with intrigue and awe. "Are ye speaking true?"

"He is," Cadderly confirmed, and he tossed a wink at the rest of the crew, all of them glad for the light-hearted respite.

"Bwahaha!" roared Athrogate. "I'm thinking that we're needin' a song for that one!"

The faces around them, particularly those in the hallway, didn't change much, however, as the weight of the situation quickly pressed the brief respite away.

"We need to prepare," Cadderly said again, when all had muted to an uncomfortable silence.

"Or we should leave this place, and quickly," said the wizard with the withered arm. "Run fast for Baldur's Gate, or some other great city where the beast daren't approach."

"Where an army of archers will greet it with doom too sudden for its clever retreat!" another voice chimed in from beyond the room's door.

Drizzt watched Cadderly through it all, as the chorus for retreat grew louder and more insistent, and Drizzt understood the priest's personal turmoil. Cadderly could not disagree with the logic of swift departure, of running far from that seemingly doomed place.

But Cadderly could not go. Damage to Spirit Soaring manifested in his personal being. And Cadderly and Danica could not go far, since their children were still missing and might be out there, or in Carradoon.

Drizzt looked to Bruenor for guidance.

"I ain't leaving," the dwarf king said without hesitation, commanding the gathering. "Let the beast come back, and we'll pound it into dust."

"That is foolish ..." the wizard with the withered arm started to argue, but Bruenor's expression stopped the debate before it could begin, and made the man blanch almost as surely as had the sight of the dracolich.

"I ain't leaving," Bruenor said again. "Unless it's to go find Cadderly's kids, or to go and find me missing friend, Pikel, who stood beside me and me kin in our time o' trial. He's lost his brother, so Lady Danica tells me, but he's not to lose his friends from Mithral Hall."

"Then you'll be dead," someone in the hall dared to say.

"We're all to die," Bruenor retorted. "Some of us're already dead, though we're not knowin' it. For when ye're to run and leave yer friends behind, then ye're surely dead."

Someone started to reply with an argument, but Cadderly shouted, "Not now!" So rare was it that the priest raised his voice in such a way that all conversation in the room and without stopped. "Go and assess the damage," Cadderly instructed them all. "Count our wounds ..."

"And our dead," the withered wizard added with a hiss.

"And our dead," Cadderly conceded. "Go and learn, go and think, and do so quickly." He looked at Drizzt and asked, "How long do we have?"

But the drow could only shrug.

"Quickly," Cadderly said again. "And for those who would leave, organize your wagons as fast as you can. It would not do you well to be caught on the road when the Ghost King returns."
* * * * *

His giant hat in hand, Jarlaxle entered the private quarters of Cadderly and Danica, who sat around the priest's desk, staring at his every step. "You surprise me," Cadderly greeted him.

"You surprise everyone around you with this new magic you've found," Jarlaxle replied, and he took the chair Danica indicated, beside her and opposite Cadderly.

"No," Cadderly replied. "I have not found any new magic. It has found me. I can't even begin to explain it, and so how can I claim ownership of it? I know not from where it comes, or if it will be there when I need it in the next crisis."

"Let us hope," said Jarlaxle.

Outside the room's south window came a commotion, horses whinnying and men calling out orders.

"They're all leaving," Jarlaxle said. "Even your friend Ginance."

"I told her to go," said Cadderly. "This is not her fight."

"You would flee, too, if you could," Jarlaxle gathered from his tone.

With a heavy sigh, Cadderly stood up and walked to the window to glance at the activity in the courtyard. "This battle has confirmed an old fear," he explained. "When I built Spirit Soaring, weaving the magic Deneir allowed to flow through this mere mortal coil, it aged me. As the cathedral neared completion, I became an old man."

"We had already said our farewells," Danica added.

"I thought I had reached the end of my life, and that was acceptable to me, for I had fulfilled my duty to my god." He paused and looked at Jarlaxle curiously. "Are you religious?" he asked.

"The only deity I grew up knowing was one I would have preferred not to know," the drow answered.

"You are more worldly than that," said Cadderly.

"No," Jarlaxle answered. "I follow no particular god. I thought to interview them first, to see what paradise they might offer when at last I have left this life."

Danica crinkled her face at that, but Cadderly managed a laugh. "Always a quip from Jarlaxle."

"Because I do not consider the question a serious one."

"No?" Cadderly asked with exaggerated surprise. "What could be more serious than discovering that which is in your heart?"

"I know what is in my heart. Perhaps I simply do not feel the need to find a name for it."

Cadderly laughed again. "I would be a liar if I told you I didn't understand."

"I would be a liar if I bothered to answer your ignorance. Or a fool."

"Jarlaxle is no fool," Danica cut in, "but of the former charge, I reserve judgment."

"You wound me to my heart, Lady Danica," said the drow, but his grin was wide, and Danica couldn't resist a smile.

"Why haven't you left?" Cadderly asked bluntly. It was that question, Jarlaxle knew, that was the reason he'd been asked to join the couple. "The road is clear and our situation seems near to hopeless, and yet you remain."

"Young man ..."

"Not so young," Cadderly corrected.

"By my standards, you will be young when you have passed your one-hundredth birthday, and young still when you have spent another century rotting in the ground," said Jarlaxle. "But to the point, I have nowhere to run that this Ghost King cannot find me. It found me in the north, outside of Mirabar. And as it found me, I knew it would find you."

"And Artemis Entreri?" Danica asked, to which Jarlaxle shrugged.

"Years have passed since I last spoke with him."

"So you came here hoping that I would have an answer to your dilemma," said Cadderly.

Again the drow shrugged. "Or that we might work together to find a solution to our common problem," he answered. "And I did not come without powerful allies to our cause."

"And you feel no guilt in involving Drizzt, Bruenor, Catti-brie, and that Pwent creature in such a desperate struggle?" Danica asked. "You would march them to near-certain doom?"

"Apparently I have more faith in us than you do, Lady," Jarlaxle quipped, and turned to Cadderly. "I was not disingenuous when I proposed to Bruenor and Drizzt that they would do well in bringing Catti-brie to this place. I knew that many of the great minds of our time had no doubt come to Spirit Soaring in search of answers - and what could provide a greater clue to the reality that has descended upon us than the affliction of Catti-brie? Even regarding the Ghost King, I believe it is all connected - more so now that Drizzt has told us that she is watching the beast in that other world in which her mind is trapped."

"They are connected," Cadderly agreed, speaking before Danica could respond. "Both are manifestations of the same catastrophe."

"In one, we may find clues to the other," said Jarlaxle. "We already have! Thank your god that Catti-brie was here, that we could discern the truth of the Ghost King's defeat, and know that the beast would return."

"If I could find my god, I would thank him," Cadderly replied dryly. "But you are correct, of course. So now we know, Jarlaxle. The beast will return, whole, angry, and wiser than in our first battle. Do you intend to remain to battle it again?"

"Such a course offers me the best chance to prevail, I expect, and so yes, good sir Cadderly, with your permission, I and my dwarf companion would like to stand beside you for that next battle."

"Granted," Danica said, cutting Cadderly short, and when she looked at him, he flashed her a smile of appreciation. "But do you have any ideas? They say you are a clever one."

"You have not witnessed enough of me to come to that conclusion on your own?" Jarlaxle said to her, and he patted his heart as if she had wounded him profoundly.

"Not really, no," she replied.

Jarlaxle burst out in laughter, but only briefly. "We must kill it quickly - that much is obvious," he said. "I see no way to hinder its ability to walk between the worlds, and so we must defeat it abruptly and completely."

"We struck at it with every magic I could manage," said Cadderly. "I merely hope to be able to replicate some of those spells - I hold no illusions that there are greater powers to access."

"There are other ways," Jarlaxle said, and he nodded his chin toward Cadderly's hand crossbow and bandolier.

"I shot it repeatedly," Cadderly reminded him.

"And a hundred bees might sting a man to little effect," the drow replied. "But I have been to a desert where the bees were the size of a man. Trust me when I tell you that you would not wish to feel the sting of but one of those."

"What do you mean?" asked Danica.

"My companion, Athrogate, is a clever one, and King Bruenor more so than he," Jarlaxle replied.

"Would that Ivan Bouldershoulder were still with us!" said Cadderly, his tone more full of hope than of lament.

"Siege weapons? A ballista?" Danica asked, and Jarlaxle shrugged again.

"Drizzt, Bruenor, and his battlerager will remain as well," Jarlaxle informed Cadderly, and the drow stood up from his chair. "Ginance and some others offered to take Catti-brie away, but Drizzt refused." He looked Cadderly directly in the eye as he added, "They don't intend to lose."

"Catti-brie should have been allowed to go," said Danica.

"No," Cadderly replied, and when both looked at him, they saw him staring out the window. Danica could see that he was suddenly deep in thought. "We need her," he said in a tone that revealed him to be certain of his claim, though not yet sure why.
* * * * *

"Copper for yer thoughts, elf," Bruenor said. He moved behind Drizzt, who stood on a balcony overlooking the courtyard of Spirit Soaring, staring out at the ruined forest where the dracolich had passed.

Drizzt glanced back at him and acknowledged him with a nod, but didn't otherwise reply - just gazed into the distance.

"Ah, me girl," Bruenor whispered, moving up beside him, for how could Drizzt be thinking of anything else? "Ye think she's lost to us."

Still Drizzt didn't reply.

"I should smack ye one for losing faith in her, elf," Bruenor said.

Drizzt looked at him again, and he withered under that honest gaze, the level of the dwarf's own confidence overwhelming his bluster.

"Then why're we stayin'?" Bruenor managed to ask, a last gasp of defiance to the drow's irresistible reasoning.

Drizzt wore a puzzled look.

"If not for bringing me girl back, then why're we staying here?" Bruenor clarified.

"You would leave a friend in need?"

"Why're we keepin' her here, then?" Bruenor went on. "Why not put her on one o' them wagons rolling away, bound for a safer place?"

"I don't believe half of them will make it out of the forest alive."

"Bah, that's not what ye're thinking!" Bruenor scolded. "Ye're thinking that we'll find a way. That as we kill this dragon thing, we'll also find a way to get me girl back. It's what ye're thinking, elf, and don't ye lie to me."

"It is what I'm hoping," Drizzt admitted, "not thinking. The two are not the same. Hoping against reason."

"Not so much, else ye wouldn't keep her here, where we're all likely to die."

"Is there a safe place in all the world?" Drizzt asked. "And something else. When the dracolich began to shift to the other plane, Guenhwyvar fled."

"Smart cat would've run off long before that," said Bruenor.

"Guenhwyvar fears no battle, but she understands the dilemma of dimensions joined. Remember when the crystal tower in Icewind Dale collapsed?"

"Aye," said Bruenor, his face brightening just a bit. "And Rumblebelly rode the damned cat to her home."

"Remember Pasha Pook's palace in Calimport?"

"Aye, a sea o' cats following yer Guenhwyvar from her home. What're ye thinking, elf? That yer cat might get you to me girl on the other plane, and might bring ye both back?"

"I don't know," Drizzt admitted.

"But ye're thinking there might be a way?" Bruenor asked in a tone as desperately hopeful as any the drow had ever heard from his dwarf friend.

He fixed Bruenor with a stare and a grin. "Isn't there always a way?"

Bruenor managed a nod at that, and as Drizzt turned his gaze outward from the balcony, he looked to the trees.

"What are they doing?" Drizzt asked a moment later, when Thibbledorf Pwent and Athrogate bobbed out of the forest, carrying a heavy log shoulder to shoulder.

"If we're meaning to stay and fight, then we're meaning to win," said Bruenor.

"But what are they doing, exactly?" Drizzt asked.

"I'm afraid to ask them two," Bruenor admitted, and he and Drizzt shared a much-needed chuckle.

"Ye going to bring in the damned cat again this fight?" Bruenor asked.

"I fear to. The seam between these worlds, between life and death as well, is too unpredictable. I would not lose Guen as I have lost ..."

His voice trailed off, but he didn't need to finish the thought for Bruenor to understand.

"World's gone crazy," the dwarf said.

"Or maybe it always was."

"Nah, but don't ye start talking like that," Bruenor scolded. "We've put a lot o' good years and good work under our girdles, and ye know it."

"And we even made peace with orcs," said Drizzt, and Bruenor's face tightened and he let out a little growl.

"Ye're a warm fire on a cold winter night, elf," he muttered.

Drizzt smiled all the wider, stood up straight, and stretched his arms and back. "We're staying and we're fighting, my friend. And one more thing we're doing ..."

"Winning," said Bruenor. "We might get me girl back and we might not, elf, but I'm meaning to stay mad for a bit." He punched Drizzt in the shoulder. "Ye ready to kill us a dragon, elf?"

Drizzt didn't answer, but the look he gave to Bruenor, his lavender eyes full of a fire the dwarf king had seen so many times before, made Bruenor almost pity the dracolich.

Down on the courtyard below, Pwent, who was leading the pair, stumbled and the two dwarves crashed down in a heap with their heavy cargo.

"If them two don't kill us all with their plannin', that wyrm ain't getting back to its hiding place," Bruenor declared. "Or if it does, then I'm meaning to find a way to chase it there and be done with it!"

Drizzt nodded, more than ready for the fight, but mixed with his expression of determination was a bit of intrigue at that last statement. His hand went to his belt pouch, to Guenhwyvar, and he wondered.

He had traveled the planes with the cat before, after all.

"What're ye thinking, elf?" Bruenor asked.

Drizzt flashed him those eyes again, so full of determination and simmering anger.

Bruenor nodded and smiled, no less determined and no less angry.
* * * * *

"Is there no way to learn?" Danica asked Cadderly.

Cadderly shook his head. "I've tried. I've asked, of Deneir or of any sentience I might find anywhere."

"I can't do this any more," Danica admitted. She slumped in her chair and put her hands over her face. Cadderly was at her side in a heartbeat, hugging her, but he had little to offer. He was no less tormented than she.

Their children were out there somewhere, maybe alive and maybe, very possibly, dead.

"I have to go back out," Danica said, straightening and taking a deep, steadying breath. "I have to go to Carradoon."

"You tried already, and it nearly killed you," Cadderly reminded. "The forest is no less - "

"I know!" Danica snapped at him. "I know and I don't care. I can't stay here and just wait and hope."

"I cannot go!" Cadderly shouted back at her.

"I know," Danica said softly, tenderly, and she reached up and ran her fingers across Cadderly's cheek. "You are bound here, tied to this place, I know. You cannot desert it, because if it falls, you fall, and our enemies win. But I have recovered from my wounds, and we have driven off the beast for now." Cadderly started to interrupt, but Danica silenced him by putting a finger over his lips. "I know, my love," she said. "The Ghost King will return and attack Spirit Soaring once more. I know. And it is a fight I welcome, for I will see that creature destroyed. But ..."

"But our children are out there," Cadderly finished for her. "They're alive - I know they are! If any of them had fallen, Spirit Soaring would feel the loss."

Danica looked at him, curious.

"They are of me, as this place is of me," Cadderly tried to explain. "They are alive, I am sure."

Danica fell back a bit and stared at her husband. She understood his confidence, but knew, too, that it was based more on a need to believe that the children were alive and well than on anything substantive.

"You cannot stay here," Cadderly said, surprising her, and she sat up straight, her eyes wide.

"You are about to fight the most desperate battle of your life, and you would send me away?"

"If the Ghost King returns and is to be defeated ..." Cadderly paused there, seeming almost embarrassed.

"It will be by the power of Cadderly, and not the fists of Danica," she reasoned.

Cadderly shrugged. "We are a powerful team, we seven, each armed in our own ways to do battle with such a beast as the Ghost King."

"But I least of all," the woman said. She held up her empty hands. "My weapons are less effective than Bruenor's axe, and I haven't the tricks of Jarlaxle."

"There is no one I would rather have fighting beside me than you," Cadderly said. "But truly, there is no one in all the world who might better elude the monsters in the forest and find our children. And if we don't have them, then ..."

"Then what is the point?" Danica finished for him. She leaned in and kissed him passionately.

"They are alive," Cadderly said.

"And I will find them," Danica whispered back.

She was out of Spirit Soaring within the hour, moving among the trees alongside the road to Carradoon, invisible and silent in the dark night.