“There, Scar!” But the eagle did not fix his keen eyes on the other beast. Even Joss found himself losing track of the horse’s flight, as if it literally possessed less substance in the air than on the ground, fading like mist under sun.

He wasn’t going to lose the cursed Guardian after all this!

He yanked ruthlessly on the jesses, and at first Scar swept a full circle and only reluctantly pulled in the direction Joss directed him. There! A wink of light stung the reeve’s eye. He followed sparks until he flew over a narrow ridge overlooking the booming ford. He tugged on the jesses and, sluggishly, Scar obeyed, gliding down until they skimmed low over the rock and, with a final tug on the jesses, landed at one end.

He’d seen Guardian altars as a young man, when he had defied the holiest law and, after the first transgression on Ammadit’s Tit, gone looking for other altars, trying to understand why the Guardians were lost. Why Marit had died.

Now he had followed a man who by any measure could be identified as a Guardian. Yet he saw neither horse nor man on the ridge, only a shimmering of light above a glimmering pattern etched into the rock. Was that a shadow of horse pacing to the center of the labyrinth? Did a ghostly figure walk the maze, no more substantial than fog rising off the ground at dawn?

He unhooked and ventured forward, then looked back over his shoulder. Scar had fallen into a stupor, head tucked under a wing. The reckless anger that had scarred his youth slammed back in all of its bitter fury. He’d killed two men today, stuck them like pigs. A battle had been fought, and many had died, and even if he wasn’t sure the enemy soldiers didn’t entirely deserve death after the misery they had no doubt inflicted on others far more innocent, he still could not wipe the taste from his tongue. He did not like the world as it had become. But that didn’t mean he could ignore it.

To the hells with the laws! What did it matter, when his dreams in the form of Marit whispered that Guardians walked again in the world to seek justice, and meanwhile those who met Guardians in the living world called them demons?

The path shone faintly. He set one foot down, followed with the second, and walked into the maze on the trail of a thing he could not explain. At each turn he looked onto a new vista, a distant landscape: smooth ocean waves; a ruined tower sited above a tumble of rocks which, before it flashed out of view, he recognized as Everfall Beacon; a tangled forest that was surely the Wild; the flat gleam of the Olo’o Sea just turning out of the shadows into the dawn’s light.

The visions made him dizzy. Voices whispered urgently.

“. . . I escaped from Indiyabu . . . she has corrupted them, thus are we lost . . . surely not, for if we keep our strength and our heart within us, we can still fight back . . . it is not possible for me to struggle any longer, take the mirror and give it to the one who returns in my place.”