We rocked along, wheels rumbling a steady rhythm. Bee made me eat cooked chicken and rolls and cheese. For half the night we rolled through forest, and eventually I slept, head resting on Bee’s shoulder. I woke at dawn to the sight of Bee paging through her sketchbook under the thin light of a cloudy day. Both Rory and the mansa dozed, Rory with his hands curled up by his face and the mansa bolt upright, his big frame filling half the opposite bench and pressing Rory’s slighter figure into the corner.

“Have you found anything new?” I asked, as if I could pull hope from her dreams.

“No.” She handed the book to me. “For the last month, all I have dreamed of is fire, and I couldn’t bear to draw all those flames for I swear to you I heard screams in them.” She pinched a length of skirt between her finger and thumb. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have told you.”

Yet for all that I stared at every sketch, I could discern nothing to tell me how to save Vai. What if he and I weren’t meant to meet ever again?

Mid-morning on the following day we stopped at a burned-out staging post to allow the coachman to tend his coach and horses. The mansa studied the coachman as the man watered the horses from a bucket whose lip never touched stream or well.

“No living horse can travel at such a steady pace without cease and not die,” said the mansa. “What manner of creature are they?”

The coachman acknowledged the mansa’s attention by flicking a forefinger against the rim of his cap, but did not deign to respond.

“The man mocks me,” said the mansa, as if it were my fault.

I glanced up at him from under half-lowered eyelids, although I did not mean to be coy. “I would be cautious in assuming that he is man.”

With a shake of his head he walked away.

Bee was still in the nearby woods doing her business. I approached the eru, who stood beside a stream watching the flash and subsidence of ripples.

“I want to thank you for coming at my call,” I said.

Away from the others she wore her female aspect. “The law of kinship binds us. But there are other reasons to answer.”

“Perhaps you can tell me what those might be,” I said, careful not to ask a question.

“Perhaps my lips are chained.”

“Perhaps the Master of the Wild Hunt chains you to his purpose.”