Effie was determined to remain excited. She absolutely wasn’t going to ruin today by thinking about the Yearning or worrying about what happened when you ran too low on lifeforce. It would be all right. Maximilian would get some new deepwater for her when she got back. It was just . . . She couldn’t run out of power again here. She’d had the Yearning once and it had been the most awful experience of her life. Well, except for losing her mother and her grandfather, that is.

Effie didn’t understand why her lifeforce seemed to run out so quickly when she was in the Otherworld, even without draining trips to the Great Library. She knew one reason was that Realworlders weren’t really designed to be here. But she was a traveler, and someone had once said her energy was more Otherworld than Realworld. So what was going wrong? And the Ring of the True Hero was supposed to help, but it just seemed to make things worse. Effie used to think that it turned used-up physical energy into magical energy, and that playing tennis for a long time while wearing it was the key. But recently it hadn’t been working. Playing tennis just seemed to drain her as well. And she hadn’t even been playing well lately. Coach Bruce kept telling Effie she had to get back in the zone, whatever that meant.

She put it all out of her mind. Her headache began to fade. Maybe it was in her imagination, like Lexy said.

“I’m all right. Let’s go,” she said to Clothilde.

Back in the Realworld, in the dim silvery light of the rising moon, this almost Midwinter evening was full of slow, delicate intrigue about which most humans knew nothing. More than half the Cosmic Web was in hibernation of course, and so at this time of year those who didn’t want to be seen started creeping about, safe in the knowledge that news of their activities wouldn’t spread very fast.

Most people ignore the constant sounds of the animals around them: the hooting, clucking, meowing, barking, howling, baying and so on. More fool them. This, of course, is the sound of the Cosmic Web in action: It is the way that animals talk to each other, spreading all sorts of news and gossip and warnings and prophecies.

So it was that the Northern Lights were on vacation with the Bermuda Triangle, resting before the big display they always put on for the various Winter Fairs around the Northern Hemisphere. Even the Luminiferous Ether had given itself some much-needed days off and had gone to join them.