The guard scowled. Yet he walked over to one of his fellows and conferred with him a while. Malden could do naught but wait—the invisible wall still held him pinned. He could not so much as scratch an itch.

The second guard ran into the house. He was gone quite a while. The others moved closer to the gate, weapons at the ready in case Malden had some charm that would free him from the invisible wall.

Not very clever of them, he thought. They should have been watching the fence, looking for some armed force approached from another direction. His own approach could have just been a diversion to hide the advance of a more dangerous force. The fact that he, who had no training in security, could see as much told him something. These were not soldiers, then, but only bravos hired to look menacing, not to effectively guard the villa. Good to know.

Not that he could make use of that information if the invisible guardian continued to hold him. It seemed he waited forever, exposed under the sun, unable to move. For a span nothing happened. Eventually, though, the guard returned from the house. He rushed over to his post as if nothing had happened, and Malden wondered if he should be left there, suspended in nothing, until he died of thirst.

But then Cythera stepped out of the doorway.

The hood of her velvet cloak was up, hiding her face in shadows. Her hands were bare, though, and seeing tattooed coils of ivy twisting around her fingers, Malden knew it was her.

She approached him directly, stopping five feet away. He supposed that spot must mark where the barrier ended on the inside—another useful thing to know.

“I am very glad to see you,” he said, smiling down upon her. “I’d bow to you, as you deserve, but as you can see, I’m a bit indisposed. If you’d be kind enough to let me down I’d be most obliged.”

“You’re a fool,” she said. “You’ll die here.”

“I’m desperate,” he told her. “If not here, I’ll die elsewhere, and just as certain.”

She gave him a look of uncertainty. A questioning look. As if she could not believe he had come here and risked so much. He smiled in return, hiding his true fear. A part of him was woefully glad to see her again, and not just because she was the only one who could get him out of the barrier.

“As you wish,” Cythera said.

She lifted her hands in a complicated gesture, her fingers tucked in or stretched outward in weird contortions. She spoke a word that Malden could not hear clearly, even at so close a distance.