“Because he’s been sensitized by passage through a Great Gate. He knows when someone passes through any gate in the world.”

That was when Danny North strode through the open door into the barn.

Trust

13

TRUST

Danny was getting dressed for another morning practice when he felt it: Something had happened at the Wild Gate.

He stopped pulling on his running shorts, froze in position. The feeling didn’t come again. He tried to think what he had actually experienced. It came from that portion of his outself that was entwined in the Great Gate in the Silvermans’ barn.

It felt like when Veevee or Hermia passed through his gates. Only far stronger.

Why? Because it was a Great Gate?

Because it was more than one person going through a gate at once.

He had felt it before when his friends went through his first Great Gate, but had not been able to think about it then because he was immediately engaged with the Gate Thief.

Now he even knew the direction they had passed. It was a group of four people, and they came from Westil to Earth.

Whoever it was had arrived in Silvermans’ barn. It was milking time. Leslie would be there.

Danny even knew who it was. Because lingering after the sensation of the Great Gate being used there was another feeling—a quickening in the gates that Danny held captive inside him. The strange gates were saying—not in words, but deeper than words—“He is coming, he is coming.” And the gates that belonged to Loki himself were brightening because their true owner was now in the same world with them. “Let us go home,” they were saying, straining ever so slightly against the restraint of Danny’s hearthoard.

The Gate Thief had brought three people with him through the Wild Gate.

Danny pulled off the shorts and put on pants and a shirt, socks and shoes and a jacket. He would not be running this morning after all.

Once he was dressed, he stepped through the gate in his house that led to the Silvermans’ upstairs hall, then walked from house to barn through the biting cold of this autumn morning. The trees were dazzling with color. There was a trace of frost on the grass.

Inside the barn, Leslie and Marion were standing side by side, looking up at the loft where Loki stood with a woman and two young boys.

“Took you long enough,” said Marion.

“I was mostly naked,” said Danny. “I stopped to dress.”

“Thank you for that,” said Leslie.

“Danny North,” said Loki.

“I don’t want you here,” said Danny in Westilian.

“I need your help,” said Loki. “But it will be hard to converse with your friend prepared to make the ground swallow us up.”

“Only swallow,” said Marion, in his heavily accented version of Westilian. “Not chew.”