It ran across the toppled remains, and everywhere it moved, a changed version of the castle appeared. One still old, still moth eaten, and still looking like it had grown up with the surrounding mountains, eons ago, or been magicked out of the earth. But this version was intact, upright, and sturdy, with towers appearing out of nowhere and pennants flapping in the breeze.

And, yes, I had seen this trick before. Only that time, Gertie had used it to flood a night sky with light from a distant, sunny day. Creating a searchlight out of literally nothing.

I hadn’t had a chance to see how she did it at the time, because the person she was searching for had been me, and she hadn’t been in a good mood. That was back when we were still adversaries, and I’d mostly been interested in avoiding her. Now, however, I felt myself getting excited.

“How are you doing that?”

She showed me.

Okay, that was clever. It involved sending a tiny tendril of the Pythian power from one place to another, and linking them like a portal. Only instead of cutting through space, she was cutting through time. And best of all, it didn’t take much power, because nothing was passing through but images. It was like a pinhole camera, a tiny thing that projected a big image onto a wall, only our wall was the current reality…

I’d been about to see if I could duplicate it, since it didn’t seem that hard. But then I noticed what I was looking at, and the spell lacing my fingers faltered and faded. Because some of the cheerfully waving pennants on the castle were on fire—

And so were some of the fey.

A bunch of screaming, running guards could be seen through the viewport in time that Gertie had created, several with plumes of dark smoke following them. A few of their fellow fey tried to put the smoking ones out, pushing them down and throwing the sand of the courtyard over them. But that was dragon fire, and it didn’t help.

One of the unfortunate guards disintegrated on the air a moment later, puffing away into nothingness, with even his bones having burnt down to ash. The other tore away from his would-be rescuers and threw himself off the castle walls. I guessed he was aiming for the river, but he fell out of sight of the viewport before he landed, so I couldn’t be sure.

Or maybe I just missed him, because I was looking for something else.