The whole world shrugged and shivered, and when it stilled it was a lesser place.

MAGIC HAD WITHDRAWN itself from Noreela, leaving behind a vacuum of hopelessness and despair.

Many Krotes threw themselves overboard, giving themselves to the sea and the creatures that lived below its surface. Others drank poisons or fell on their swords. Lenora crawled across the deck, but by the time she reached the burning sail she had intended wrapping herself in, the flames had withered.

The Mages vanished from view. The next time anyone saw them was ten days later, when strong winds had carried them to an icy shore far to the north.

LENORA, SITTING ASTRIDE her hawk’s neck and remembering that distant past, still shivered at the memory of magic’s retreat. It had taken a long time for them to shake off the hopelessness that had descended across the whole of the surviving Krote fleet. And it had taken three hundred years for magic to show its face again.

This time, the Mages would have it for their own.

TREY WAS UNABLE to sleep. He was traumatized by what had happened, stunned awake by the simple conviction that none of it was possible. His mother could not be dead, Sonda could not be dead, their underground community must surely still be there, going about its business and wondering, in bars and shops and the square where the puppeteer played his plays, just where Trey Barossa had gone.

But as he watched the sun rise in the east he knew that it was true. All the pain, the suffering, the anguish was as obvious to him now as the cool dawn. The redness bleeding out between the mountains hurt his eyes and he turned his back to the sunrise to watch Alishia.

Since falling and banging her head she had turned strange. He thought she may have fractured her skull. The bump was not huge and it had hardly bled, but from that moment, after passing out for just a few minutes and then waking shouting and dancing and laughing, she had been all but comatose. Her eyes were open and her lips moved, making no sound. She sat up straight, hands on her knees, fingers flexing every now and then as if to work stiffness from the joints. But she said nothing, and she seemed unaware of his presence.

Perhaps she was like this most of the time. He did not know her, and she was a topsider, after all. Maybe this was the way she made friends.