Ash cast. It was like the sun setting—beautiful, remorseless, full of awe and wonder. Thorn had never seen a working so puissant and so close up—the calling of a star from the heavens was child’s play by comparison. As he reached the climax, Ash said, “Is she the one, though? Is this the will that has defaced my will?”

Thorn had no idea what that might mean.

Ash said the word. Thorn heard it and for a moment, he looked on the abyss, the dark between the spheres where evil lived and no angel dared fly.

On freeing the third wyvern, Amicia knew her adversary had accepted her challenge. She felt his resistance stiffen through her reversal of the summoning.

She felt the chill, damp air of the counter building in the north.

But she was close to her home—close enough to feel the pull of Lissen Carak and to know the comfort of the choir of sisters who waited there. They were singing. She reached into the flowing stream of their powers and lifted her hands into the air. On her bridge, she stood in the same posture, almost on tiptoe with her hands high above her head.

And as the great summoning, a masterwork, descended on her, she did something new—something that she had never before attempted, or even, before that very moment, thought possible.

Instead of answering power with power, she instead pronounced on the underpinnings of his creation an act of annihilation. She did not shield—she denied. She did not resist—she refuted.

Tom Lachlan sat on his horse watching the chit. A beautiful woman, wasted on the fleshless life of the convent—he could see what Gabriel saw in her. And when she stretched herself to cast her witchery, he almost drooled.

The burst of light took them all by surprise. One moment, she stood quietly, perhaps twenty yards ahead of them, and in another, she burned like the brightest torch imaginable. Just on the edge between one beat of his great heart and another, he saw her—she seemed a second sun illuminating the world, and all the world around them reflected the light of her, so that he could see Wishart’s wisdom and boldness, his own reckless courage, Kenneth Dhu’s boundless generosity, as if they were mirrors of virtue reflecting her greatness.

Wishart said, “Oh, my God.”

The world seemed to invert. For a fraction of a grain of sand of an instant of time, Tom Lachlan and all the knights by him felt as if they had no selves—as if they stood outward on the rim of the sphere, gazing in at the workings of tiny men and monsters, and the inversion was such that men fell to their knees and muttered that they had been one with God.

Even Tom Lachlan.

Amicia, pierced and burning, said, “Black is white.”

Ash roared.