Despite the help of the drowthers, Ced could not hide from a Gatefather forever. If the people would not talk to Wad openly, he would open a tiny window in their houses and listen to their conversation. They told him all he wanted to know, and more: They knew that Ced was the windmage who had harmed them so; they knew he came from another world; Ced had told them all of this himself. He was the god of the wind, come in person to apologize for the harm his mighty gales had wrought, and to make amends as best he could.

At last a window revealed Ced himself, asleep in the place of honor near the fire, in a house with a chimney, marking it as the richest in the hamlet.

Wad gated him from the house so gently that he didn’t wake up. It was the cold that woke him, half an hour later; the wind itself, cold and thin at the top of a high crag in the Mitherkame.

*   *   *

CED AWOKE SHIVERING and knew at once that a gatemage had him, for how else could he have been taken out of the warm house and out into the cold? The wind told him he was in an open place, the lightness of the air that he was very high up. And when he opened his eyes, the starlight showed him that he lay on a patch of ground not more than ten strides in every direction before a drop-off that hid the rest of the world from view.

“Sorry to take you from the fire,” said the young man who sat watching him. Ced recognized him at once—the mage who had come to meet Danny North at the tail of the Great Gate. The Gate Thief. The enemy.

“I’m not the one you want,” Ced warned the man at once. “He went back to Earth.”

“I know where Danny North is,” said the Gate Thief. “He has most of my outself with him. Is the captive ever unaware of the boundaries of his prison?”

“Is that where I am now? A prison?” asked Ced.

“A place for undistracted conversation,” said the Gate Thief. “No one will interrupt us. But a mage of your power—no, I could not keep you here, if you wanted to be gone.”

“A mage of my power,” Ced answered scornfully. “A monster power that harms everyone and helps no one.”

“And yet you keep using it,” said the Gate Thief.

“The air calls to me,” Ced whispered. “Day and night, I hear it singing. I feel it on the hairs of my arms, my legs. It wakens me and I can feel the motion of all the airs of the world. Faraway winds and gales, nearby breezes, the passing of a running deer, the wings of a butterfly. This place is too much for me.”