MARCUS MET WITH NO FURTHER UNTOWARD INCIDENTS ON HIS journey home. He and his escort arrived back at Idylswylde in the early hours of the morning. Upon sighting the walls of the castle—black and grim against the gray light of dawn—he could not contain his impatience and outdistanced his escort. His clattering arrival at the gatehouse startled the sleepy guards. Hearing the pounding of a horse’s hooves, they thought that some dire event had occurred. They were on their feet, with weapons at the ready, when Marcus came galloping up. Apprehension turned to relief and pleasure, and they welcomed the prince home, and sped him on his way through the outer walls.

As he rode beneath the battlements, he looked at the cannons, lined up in a row on the wall, etched starkly against the light of the morning, black against pearl. The cannons crouched on the walls like some cold, unfeeling beast, ready to breathe fire and death on their foe. The sight was an arresting one and struck him forcibly, so that he slowed his horse. He’d seen the cannons often enough. He couldn’t think why the sight of the guns should so disturb him now.

And then he understood. He was seeing them with the eyes of dragons. He was seeing them now as he’d seen them in his wild dance through dragon dreams.

The cannons. Soulless monstrosities. Able to carelessly take what is given only once and, when lost, is lost forever.

“Man cannot breathe fire and you can,” Marcus said to the dragons aloud. “We have made all things equal.”

He rode on.

Word of Marcus’s recovery had traveled faster. His parents had been up all night, watching for him. When he stood before his mother, safe and whole, Ermintrude flung her arms around him and clung to him, crying, and he could not help but shed a few tears himself. Edward received his son with few words and a firm embrace. The old seneschal, Gunderson, stood by, watching the reunion with heartfelt pleasure.

Ermintrude was shocked at her son’s gaunt appearance and wanted to carry him off to be fed and pampered and put to bed. Marcus agreed to food, but said firmly that he needed to talk to his parents immediately on a matter of the utmost urgency.

His father, looking grim, and his mother, looking apprehensive, accompanied their son to the king’s study.

Marcus had been thinking all the way home on how to convince his father of the terrible threat facing them, a threat coming from an enemy kingdom that had bordered theirs for centuries, yet one no one had seen or heard of. Even now, if the king went hunting for his enemy, he would not find them. And this was an enemy whose capacity for destruction made the armies of the King of Weinmauer look like little boys playing at war with wooden swords.