The next place was very warm, the weather very hot, so Ciri, Kelpie and the unicorn dried off and steamed like three kettles. They found themselves on some sweltering moors at the edge of a forest. At once it could be deduced it was a very large forest, quite simply a dense, wild and inaccessible wilderness. Hope that it might be Brokilon Forest thumped in Ciri’s heart, the hope that at last it might be a familiar and appropriate place.

They rode slowly along the edge of the forest. Ciri was looking out for something that might serve as a sign. The unicorn snorted, raised his head and horn, and looked around. It was anxious.

‘Do you think, Little Horse,’ she asked, ‘that they might be following us?’

A snort–comprehensible and unambiguous even without telepathy.

‘We haven’t managed to flee far enough away yet?’

She didn’t understand what he telepathically told her in answer. There was no far or near? A spiral? What spiral?

She didn’t understand what he was talking about. But the anxiety infected her.

The scorching moors weren’t the right place or the right time.

They understood it in the early evening, when the heat eased off, and instead of one, two moons rose in the sky above the forest. One large, the other small.

The next place was a seashore, a steep cliff, from which they saw breakers crashing against strangely-shaped rocks. They smelled the sea wind, and terns, black-headed gulls and petrels screeched, covering the ledges of the cliff in a restless white layer.

The sea reached all the way to the dark, cloudy horizon.

Down below, on the rocky beach, Ciri suddenly noticed the skeleton of a gigantic fish with a horrendously huge head partly buried in the shingles. Its great teeth, bristling in its sun-bleached jawbones, were at least three spans long, and it seemed one could have ridden a horse into its maw and easily paraded under the portals of its ribs without knocking one’s head against its spine.

Ciri wasn’t certain if fish like that existed in her world and her time.

They rode along the edge of the cliff, and the seagulls and albatrosses weren’t frightened at all, reluctantly moving out of their way. Why, they even tried hard to peck and pinch the feathers on Kelpie and Ihuarraquax’s fetlocks! Ciri instantly understood that the birds had never seen a human or a horse. Or a unicorn.

Ihuarraquax snorted, shook his head and horn, clearly anxious. It turned out he had reason to be.