“It’s not a noose, it’s a loop,” said Danny. “It’s so I don’t have to hold on so tightly while I spin. I want to have my mind clear.”

“You could just spin around on the ground, like a dervish,” said Veevee.

“I made the gate on the end of a rope last time,” said Danny, “so until I know more I’m doing it the same way this time. For all we know, the strength or endurance or power of the gate depends on the speed of my spin.”

“Or it has no effect at all.”

“Time to experiment with that is after we gatemages have passed through the gate ourselves.”

“And back again,” said Veevee.

Danny knew what she was thinking of. “We don’t know for sure if Ced decided to stay there or not. All it would have taken was a moment’s hesitation. The Gate Thief was on me almost instantly. It could easily have been Marion and Leslie trapped there as well.”

Stone appeared at the tail of the gate to his house in Washington, DC. “Hello, Veevee,” he said.

“‘Veevee’?” she said indignantly. “Not ‘My darling’ or ‘My love’ or—”

“O glorious Gatemage,” said Stone. “O most admirable of women. O thou wife.”

“There we go,” said Veevee, preening playfully. “It may take a little prompting, but you know how to make a girl feel all princessy.”

“It’ll be interesting to see what a Meadowfriend becomes after passing through the Great Gate. I have visions of being able to make every lawn in America grow so rapidly, with grass so tall, that people can’t find their houses.”

“And the buffalo herds return to roam all over North America, consuming lawn grass at a prodigious rate, and yet the grass leaps ever higher,” said Veevee.

“Grass growing from cracks in the sidewalks and asphalt tears it all into little chunks,” said Stone. “In this profuse jungle of life, no vehicle can move; even helicopters can’t land for longer than a minute or two before grass grows up so thick that the blades can’t turn again.”

“And three hundred million people die of starvation,” said Danny dryly.

“But the vast lawns make such a lovely cemetery,” said Veevee.

“Don’t worry, Danny. Even if I could do it, I wouldn’t,” said Stone. “Lawns are the least interesting plants in the world. Everything interesting has been bred out of them. A true meadow has at least a hundred different species of grass, clumping here and there, with a thousand wildflowers and bulbs and tubers and mosses and ferns and—”

“Day lilies,” said Veevee. “I do love day lilies.”

“The poodles of the plant world,” said Stone scornfully.

“So pretty,” said Veevee. “Alone or in great fields of them. Don’t leave them out of our meadow, darling.”

Stone looked at Danny and rolled his eyes.

“I saw that, Peter,” said Veevee. “Eyerolling is rude.”