Pat was startled. Nobody could read her face; what had she given away? “Mrs. Silverman,” Pat said.

“Leslie,” said Mrs. Silverman.

“Miz Leslie,” said Pat. “Nobody’s life is ‘just fine’ right now.”

“A southern girl,” said Leslie. “‘Miz’ Leslie. I like that.”

Mr. Silverman cleared his throat. “Are we all friends now? Can we move on?”

“Grump,” said Leslie.

“Why do you need her here, Danny?” he asked again.

“Because I can’t fix what’s wrong with these boys, and there’s a good chance that she can.”

Pat’s immediate thought was, And there’s an overwhelming chance that I can’t. But she said nothing, because she had no idea what kind of fixing they needed, or why a windmage would be involved in it.

“There’s nothing wrong with us,” said the younger boy. Pat thought back to what Danny had called him in previous conversations. Enopp. The silent older one was Eluik.

Danny had told her that Enopp thought he was a gatemage, while it seemed Eluik had some of the powers of a manmage, like his mother, because during the boys’ terrifying confinement in separate caves in Iceway, on Westil, Eluik had somehow sent his ba into his brother, to comfort him. Now he was stuck there, because, in his inexperience, he did not know how to return; or, fearful now himself, he was afraid to let go of his brother. Danny had speculated that, no matter how it began, it wasn’t the older brother comforting the younger anymore. It was Eluik now who was afraid to let go, and instead he communicated with Enopp and Enopp spoke for him to the others.

Only now Pat could sense things that were beyond the reach of other mages. She and Danny were the only living souls who had been to Duat and then returned. In the process, not only had they become capable of detecting each other’s inself and outself, but now they understood that the inself, the ka, was the original self, while the outself, the ba, the wanderer, the doodlebug, was really someone else, an independent entity or entities that their guide in Duat had taught them to call “pret.”

The pret or prets that made up a mage’s outself had entered into this close bond voluntarily, but now it could not be broken. That’s why, as soon as Danny gave them back to themselves, the wild captive left-behind gates immediately returned to Duat, to rebind themselves with the masterful pret to whom they had bound themselves before he or she was born. They could be kidnapped, as the Gate Thief had done, or lent out, as Danny had done when he “gave” his gates to Loki; but they could never belong to anyone but the ka to whom they had bound themselves as ba.