He was beginning, as always, to feel tense and sick, as if at any moment he might actually be ill. He wouldn’t overreact – not this time, not again.

But she found again the edge of his collar, and Fier’s stomach lurched up into his throat, and in a volcanic rush of alarm, he wrenched himself free and shoved her away from him with a force he didn’t intend. She stumbled backward into another guest. The movement dislodged her mask and it fell and behind it, she had no face at all.

Then she was the witch – the stooped old woman with lightning in her eyes and her proffered stone exploding into black smoke—

He woke, gazing this time into a void without stars, nothing but an ache in his chest to tell him he wasn’t dead.

How long had he been here? Where was Sir Eckhart? Where was the witch?

Something slithered past, darkness on darkness, and Fier felt a too-familiar churning of fear and sickness twist through his heart. He curled in on himself, hoped he was likewise invisible in the gloom, and the shadow passed. He could still feel his heart beating rabbit-fast, but the breathless, mindless panic eased. It was gone. He was safe, until it wandered back.

Slowly, the lines etched in gradually as his vision adjusted, Fier could make out the edges of a bed and a great oak wardrobe rising up from the floor like a behemoth, its doors ajar. A grey-black rectangle at the foot of the bed must have been a trunk – his trunk. This was his bedroom.

This might well have been another dream. The hazy edges of the garden masquerade were gone, as was the persistent sense of déjà vu, but nothing in this place felt quite real, either. He didn’t feel real. The masked woman’s hands had been cold and heavy, but here, he could feel nothing at all: he knew where his hands ought to be, but they had no shape or weight; he knew where his legs ought to be, but those, too, seemed absent. He couldn’t feel anything at all except for the tight, tight knot of his heart.

Maybe he was dead.

Something in his mind slipped out of place, tilting him out of his bedroom, and he fell down, down, down, out of the room and away.

Stars. He had never seen so many stars.

Petra

Even in the soft, rosy light of morning, the manor looked cold and forlorn. Calling it haunted had never struck Petra as the proper term. Lonely seemed more accurate. It stood tall and square and silent in the heart of its now-wild gardens, ready to be a home again, should someone come back to it. Ivy crowded the brickwork and birds built their ramshackle nests in the eaves, but Petra knew as well as anyone that plants could not serve as a replacement for human company.