Living with the Silvermans had prepared Eluik and Enopp for the American way of life. None of the customs of Iceway applied, and while there were differences between the Diamond kitchen and Leslie’s cooking back in Ohio, the ways of procuring the food—buying packages in stores, keeping everything in refrigerators and freezers, baking and frying and grilling and nuking things according to an arcane set of principles that Eluik couldn’t begin to guess at—were very similar. The colonel joked about cooking up the native fauna—about raccoon and squirrel stews, and how oily and nasty possum meat tasted (“but it would keep you alive in a pinch”)—but nothing like that was served.

Eluik and Enopp had grown up on wild game, when there was meat at all, and Eluik missed it, though Enopp professed that when it came to eating, he never wanted to leave Mittlegard, or America, or even stray more than a hundred miles from the Ohio River. But that was a matter not at all under their control.

Mother would call for them sometime. Probably not soon, because as Danny North explained, Anonoei had spent years setting up the destruction of Queen Bexoi, and now that she had to live inside Bexoi’s body and pretend to be her, she had to find a way to undo all her plotting—preferably without betraying people who had, after all, trusted her when she had her own body. It was a very tricky thing to do. Of course it would take time. Of course.

Enopp seemed not to mind, but to Eluik, Mittlegard was not home. Maybe it had to do with his having been older, having a clearer memory of life in Kamesham and inside the palace of Nassassa before they were abducted and thrown into prison. To Enopp, Mittlegard was simply the world he knew; to Eluik, it was an alien place where he didn’t really belong.

And maybe it was also because Enopp was already coming into his magery. Danny and Pat and Veevee and even Hermia spoke as if it were merely possible that Enopp would grow up to be a gatemage. But Eluik could see clearly that while Enopp was not a Gatefather at the level of Danny North or Wad, he still had a very large number of prets that would serve as gates inside him.

So to Enopp, who could go anywhere and leave a gate behind, what did it matter where he lived? He would have gates enough inside him to make a Great Gate all by himself. So the differences between worlds were less important.

Eluik knew that even without gates, he could travel from place to place, leaving no trace of his passage. He had learned that from Pat as she helped him and Enopp separate. He had seen and understood the prets, had seen how dazzling and powerful Enopp was, how many prets had chosen to follow him.