"Eagle." The sergeant addressed her. "First watch, if you will, out at the second line of wall. Keep a particular eye out for will-o-the-wisps, any strange glamour of light. Listen hard."

The other Stephen joined her about fifty paces out from the opening of the chapel, where a low stone wall made a protected vantage point. He was a good dozen or more years older, pale-haired, blue-eyed, steady, smart, patient, and tough.

They braced themselves a body's length apart to get the broadest view of the slope of the fore hill and the lower ground, all lost in night. In good weather they might have marked the passing of time by the rise and fall of the stars, but as it was they just sat, watching and listening. Now and again a shimmer of rain passed over, but it always faded. It was silent and cool. He shifted occasionally, feet scraping on the ground. For some reason her hands ached, and twice she inhaled a curious scent of charred wood melded with the acrid flavor of juniper.

Stephen said, "did you hear that?"

"No."

Night noises, nothing more: a brief hiss of rain, the crackle of branches where the wind stroked them. The shifting and settling of the earth as it cooled. A cold breeze poured out of the heavens, seeming to drop right down on them from the height of the sky.

We are alone in the world, she thought.

And then: All things are alone, yet nothing is alone, it is all tangled together, woven as in a weir to create an obstacle or diversion or as in a tapestry to make out of its parts a vision of a greater whole.

She felt Stephen's presence, how he shifted to find a more comfortable position for his right knee, how he stifled a cough by turning it into a grunt. She felt the pool of air beyond where the land sloped away downward. She smelled the sparks and ash of the wood fire and the aroma of horsehair and horse piss and horse manure. A man coughed, back in the shelter of the chapel.

She yawned, swaying, and slipped into that semi-alert twilight state that is neither waking nor sleep.

The wind picked her up as if she were a downy feather, and she spun away across the ruins, across a river, across forest and distant hamlets and stretches of meadowland and woodland farther and farther still, uncounted leagues flashing beneath her until the landscape that fell away under her feet was grass and only grass, pale in the dawn twilight. There comes blindingly and amazingly a glimpse of the rising sun tinted blue behind a veil of dust as it shoulders up over a golden-green horizon of grass. A procession moves at a steady pace through this grass, strange folk with almond-shaped eyes and eastern complexions. Some are Quman, wearing feathered wings attached to their armored coats; some are women whose hips flow into and become the bodies of horses. One is a shaman stippled with the tattoos of his kind, the spirit companions whose magic he can call on at need. She follows them. They are taking her where she needs to go.