Scatter the ashes. Or else I might return, and in what shape that would be, I dare not contemplate. But mark my words, if you allow me to come back, more hideous than I am now…

I found myself standing some feet away from him. Not a sound from Amel. Just this creature with its back to the fire, his wavering figure surrounded by a halo of flickering light.

Gremt came up silently beside me.

“This is my fault, all of this,” he said. I felt his arm on mine.

“I did scatter the ashes,” I whispered. It sounded so stupid, so childlike. “I scattered them just as you told me to do,” I said to Magnus. “I scattered them.”

The figure’s face was in shadow against the blaze, but I could see the expression softening.

“Oh, I know you did, young one,” he said in a frayed and broken voice. “I remember, and I remember your tears and your terror.” He appeared to sigh with his whole spectral body, and then to cover his face with his long spidery fingers, his tangled black-and-silver hair falling down over him like a veil. “How stupid I was. I thought if you were born in terror you’d be all the stronger for it. Child that I was of a cruel age, I respected cruelty. And now I deplore it more than any other thing under Heaven. Cruelty. If I could strip the earth of any one thing, it would be cruelty. I would give my soul to strip the earth of cruelty. I look at you and I see the son of my cruelty.”

“What comfort can I give you, Magnus?” I said.

He threw back his head and lifted his hands. His fingers fluttered, white and pleading, and he prayed in Old French to God and the saints and the Virgin. Then his dark eyes fixed on me again.

“Child, I wanted to beg your forgiveness for all of it, casting you a vagabond on the Devil’s Road without a word of instruction, making you the young and vulnerable heir to what I myself couldn’t endure.”

He sighed and turned away and made his way to his chair. He reached for the back of it. I could feel that white hand that closed on the wood, feel it as it had touched me all those long years ago:

But you can’t leave me!…Not the fire. You can’t go into the fire!

That was my voice, the voice of the boy I’d been at twenty, immortal for less than an hour.

Oh, yes, I can. Yes, I can!…my brave Wolfkiller.

I couldn’t bear the sight of him, bent, shuddering, seeming to lean for mortal support upon the chair. I couldn’t bear the groan that came from him, or the way he stood upright and rocked back and forth as though interrogating Heaven with his hands raised again.