‘I might get back before you leave,’ I told them, ‘but it would be as well to say goodbye in case I do not.’ I suddenly felt all the sorrow of my looming departure from the Land, to which I had been told I would never return. This time it was I who reached out and took their clasped hands in mine. ‘It has been an unlooked-for pleasure to see you here, my friends, and though I wish it had been a longer visit and that I had more time to spend with you, I am very grateful you came and more than glad to hear how well things are progressing for you and for all the others in the Norselands.’

‘Lady Elspeth, it aches me that I must say a final goodbye to you,’ Cinda said, speaking through the image in her mind.

I responded using my own image so that she alone heard my words. ‘Someone once told me that even the wise do not see all things, and what they do see may be misunderstood. Perhaps we shall meet again, even if not in the Land.’

She smiled to hear herself quoted, but her eyes were sad. ‘I will hope for it with all my heart and I wish you well in the days to come and pray that all may be as you desire.’ She embraced me and I felt how very slender she was in my arms. There was not truly much more flesh to her now than when I had first set eyes on her in the chamber of the One in the black city on Herder Isle. Her true strength had always been of heart and spirit, rather than of flesh and muscle.

When she released me, Elkar embraced me too and then they went out together, leaving me alone.

Chapter 10

10

I had just drifted to the borderland of sleep when a memory brought me abruptly awake: I had once seen a map showing the whereabouts of the weaponmachines that had destroyed the Beforetime.

Lukas Seraphim had rebuilt Obernewtyn at the end of the Age of Chaos, while his bondmate, the coldly beautiful Marisa, had pursued her fascination with the Beforetime. Buying Beforetime books and other forbidden artefacts, she had eventually unearthed a pre-holocaust map showing what she had believed to be the weaponmachines that had destroyed the Beforetime, but which I now knew must have shown the whereabouts of Sentinel.