The decision to leave had not been an easy one. It had taken him a long time to make it. He had sat out there in the dark and the chill, staring back at the lights of the castle and wondering what had hit him, so stunned he didn’t even move for the first half hour; he just sat there. His emotions ran the gamut from shock to fear to anger and back again. It was like a bad dream from which you are certain you will escape—even after the time for escape is long past. He recounted the events of the night over and over again in his mind, trying to construct some rational explanation for their being, to discover some purpose to their order. He failed. It all came down to the same thing—Meeks was in and he was out.

It was with a sense of desperation that he finally acknowledged that what had happened to him was for real. He had given up a life and a world that were familiar and safe to come into Landover; he had risked losing everything he had on the chance that he would find something better. Obstacles had confronted him at every turn, but he had overcome them. He had gained in reality what most found only in dreams. Now, just when he had begun to feel comfortable with what he had, just when it seemed the worst was past, everything he had struggled so hard to find had been snatched away from him, and he was faced with the distinct possibility that he would end up losing it all.

It wasn’t possible. It wasn’t fair.

But it was a fact, and he hadn’t been a successful trial lawyer for all those years in the old world by avoiding the reality of facts. So he choked down his desperation, got over being too stunned to move, swept away the anger and the fear, and forced himself to deal with his situation. His repeated replays of what had happened to him failed to yield the information he might have wished. Meeks had tricked him into returning to the old world, and he had carried the wizard back with him into Landover. Meeks had done that by sending him a false dream about Miles. But Meeks had also sent the dreams of the missing books of magic and the black unicorn to Questor Thews and Willow. Why had he done that? There had to be a reason. The dreams were all tied together in some way; Ben was certain of it. He was certain as well that something had forced Meeks to choose this particular time to return to Landover. His diatribe in the bedchamber had made that clear. In some way Ben had messed up his plans—and it was more than simply the thwarting of the wizard’s sale of the throne of Landover to others or the exiling of the wizard from his home world. It was something else—something of far greater importance to Meeks. The wizard’s anger at Ben was fueled by events and circumstances that Ben hadn’t yet uncovered. They had compelled Meeks to return—almost out of desperation.