But Fox shook his head. “I cannot say. Every test is different.”

And with that, leaving her without any answers at all, he turned and vanished into the darkness.

She was almost afraid to sleep, until she reasoned with herself that there was no point in trying to put this off. If the Elementals were determined to test her further in dreams, there was really nothing she could do to prevent that. She would have to sleep eventually, after all.

So she did everything she could think of to steady herself, climbed into her bed, and composed herself for sleep.

One moment she was lying in her bed. The next she was . . . somewhere else.

It was like swimming, or rather floating, but in the air rather than in water. There was no sign of the ground anywhere around, but it didn’t feel as if she was falling, so she felt no fear at all.

There was no horizon, just an endless blue all around her. An empty, endless blue, with light everywhere, but no actual light source.

It was so quiet . . . so very, very quiet.

Then the universe shivered with a single, low note. As if someone had softly struck a gong the size of a mountain.

And then . . . it faded into her view.

It was huge, bigger than the Thunderbird had been. And she couldn’t have said what, exactly, it was. It certainly wasn’t human. But it was no animal, no bird, that she recognized. It had eyes, but everything else was constantly changing, as clouds changed even as you watched them. She couldn’t read the eyes, either; they showed no emotion that she was able to recognize.

Wasn’t the Greek God of the Air . . . Chaos?

Without any warning at all, she found herself—or her mind, anyway, being leafed through like a book. One moment, she was just hovering there, and in the next, it was as if something was calling up memory after memory at a dizzying pace. Memories of being tiny, and watching the sylphs play above her. Of being a little older, and watching the pixies, and ever so carefully, to keep from frightening them, trying to get their attention.

Of Mother teaching her the rudiments of magic. Of learning to shield, and to use it wisely. Of calling small storms to water the garden, of clearing clouds away so the wash would dry. Of making lights in the darkness, of feeding the sylphs bits of it. And then . . .

When that handsome, terrible man had tried to hurt her.

The moment froze. She froze, caught in the terror of the time, reliving it as if it was still happening.

She felt the Being examining the memory, the emotions, carefully. Weighing it. Measuring it.

And then, dismissing it and moving on. She watched herself learning to defend herself, and learning to shoot, and then the memories began passing through her too quickly for her to recognize them properly, until suddenly they froze again.