Thorn didn’t cower—his form would not allow him to cower. But Ash’s semblance had changed and he rose like a cloud of fury over Thorn’s twisting stone form.

“Unfair!” he roared. “Thorn—we must move quickly.”

Thorn stood stolidly in water to his stony knees. “In this?” he asked.

The voice of the shadowy dragon ate at him like acid.

“One of them is at the very edge of Being. And she—she Denied me.” Ash’s eyes held not rage but fascination. “I must unmake her before my enemy has a potent ally. Forget Dorling. We’ll have sweeter meat.”

Thorn felt that he was speaking to a mad thing.

But Ash’s voice calmed. The roar of death and the vein of ice retreated and there was intellect and command. “No,” Ash said. “I must consider. I cannot have a foe on my flank—and the Wyrm, contemptible as he is in his bookish indolence, could be a powerful foe. I must force his talons to open. But that woman—a curse on all humans and their endless striving. She will unbalance us all. She doesn’t even know what the game is.”

Thorn thought he knew. And he thought he might know of whom Ash spoke.

And Ash had not detected his hoarding of potentia.

Thorn thought many things, and he kept them to himself.

Amicia found herself on her knees.

For a long, long time—almost an eternity—she had experienced something she could only call the joy of creation.

In her mind, the choir sang on.

One voice was not a woman’s voice, but a man’s.

“Amicia,” he said. “Come back. It is too soon.”

Miriam reached out with the power of the choir at her back and found her allies—odd allies. The faery folk and the magister had formed their own choir—an earthy green chorus, like a well-toned tavern revel compared to her beautifully ordered schola. But effective, despite singing carefully and softly in the aethereal, merely shaping and supporting her own with immense subtlety.

Supporting her.

She reached out—mind to mind, image to image, and boldly she went into Harmodius’s palace, where she was pleased to see he was still a handsome young man in velvet.

“It is a sin to seize another’s body,” Miriam said. “That seems a rude way to begin, but that’s who I am.”

Harmodius nodded. “Well, Madame Abbess, would you think better of me if I said he was dead when I took it? Of course, I would then have to confess that he was only dead because I stormed him from within and killed him in his own palace.”

Miriam shuddered, even in her own place of power. “That’s impossible.”