I hadn’t expected the shift, as the Pythian power had already been surrounding us and therefore gave me no warning. I landed awkwardly, stumbling on a rock-strewn terrain a few feet from the edge of a cliff. Pebbles rolled under my shoes, but Gertie steadied me with a hand under my arm, allowing me to regain my balance.

I recovered, only to find myself looking down from one of the surrounding mountains, along a shelf of land well above the castle’s stony corpse. From this angle, that term seemed completely appropriate, with the tumbled stones looking like bleached bones protruding from the earth, as if some great leviathan had fallen on the spot. It made me think of Aeslinn and the body he’d have left, had I managed to kill him on the Thames.

What would Zeus have done, had his ride perished? Would he have died, too, since their souls seemed to be intermingled? Or were they sharing power some other way, and it would have just pissed him off? Because I didn’t see Zeus trusting Aeslinn with his life…

“Cassie!” I blinked and realized that Gertie was looking at me impatiently. She was no more tolerant of inattention to lessons than Eugenie had been. I rearranged my face, and tried not to look like I was skeeved out just from being here.

“Yes?”

“We’re about to begin. Watch carefully.”

I watched, although for a moment there was nothing to see. Just the ruined castle on its isolated hill, the churning river, gray and angry and far below, and a lot of trees. Then I noticed what looked like a plastic bag, which had blown into the air a good way off the edge of the drop.

Only they didn’t have plastic in this era.

A moment later, it started to expand, growing from a tiny thing, the kind you’d lug your groceries home in, to something the size and shape of a kiddie pool. And I realized that it wasn’t a tinted bag, slightly distorting the color of the sky behind it, after all. But rather a hole in space, showing a completely different view on the other side.

It grew some more, rippling a little at the edges, and I realized that I still had it wrong. It wasn’t a hole in space but in time. I could see the castle through the wider opening, just like in the present day. Only what I was seeing looked very different.

“Telescope spell,” Gertie said, before I could ask. “Another way to look before you leap, and one that keeps us out of the byways.”

I nodded, but didn’t ask any questions right then. I was too busy staring at what the telescope was revealing.