What we have in life that we can count our own is who we are and where we come from, she thought absently. For better or worse, that’s what we have to sustain us in our endeavors, to buttress us in our darker moments, and to remind us of our identity. Without those things, we are adrift.

Her gaze shifted to the darkness outside the kitchen window. John Ross must feel that way now. He must feel that way every day of his life. It was what he gave up when he became a Knight of the Word. It was what he lost when he discovered the truth about Stefanie Winslow.

She listened to the silence that backdropped the ticking of the clock. After a long time, she picked up the real estate contracts, walked to the garbage can, and dropped them in.

Moving to the phone, she dialed Robert at Stanford. She listened to four rings, and then his voice mail picked up.

At the beep, she said, “Hey, Robert, it’s me.” She was still looking out the window into the dark. “I just wanted to let you know that I’m home again. Call me. Bye.”

She hung up, stood looking around her at the house for a moment, then walked back down the hallway, pulled on her parka, and went out into the cold, crisp autumn night to find Pick.

It was just after four in the morning when John Ross woke from his dream. He lay staring into the empty blackness of his room for a long time, his breathing and his heartbeat slowing as he came back to himself. On the street outside his open window, he could hear a truck rumble by.

It was the first dream he had experienced since he had resumed being a Knight of the Word. As always, it was a dream of the future that would come to pass if he failed to change things in the present. But it felt new because it was his first such dream in a long time.

Except for the dream of the old man and the Wizard of Oz, of course, but he did not think he would be having that dream anymore.

He closed his eyes momentarily to gather his thoughts, to let the tension and the fury of this night’s dream ease. In the dream, he had been stripped of his magic, as he knew he would be, because he had chosen to expend his magic in the present, and when he made that choice, the price was always the same: For the span of one night’s sleep, there was no magic to protect him in the future. He often wondered how long the loss of magic lasted in real time. He could not tell, for he was given only a glimpse of what was to be before he came awake. If he used the magic often enough in the present, he sometimes wondered, would he at some point lose the use of it completely in the future?