I shrugged. Whatever the map did or did not show, I had to find Cassandra’s key before I could complete my quest. How I was to do that when I knew only that Jacob had taken it with him from Obernewtyn, I had no notion. What I did know was that both Cassy and Hannah had regarded the key he had taken with him as vital to my quest.

I climbed into bed, drawing the covers up about my neck. The sheets were cold and as I lay still waiting for them to warm, it occurred to me that Zarak would be disappointed to learn he had been wrong in his guess that Hannah had been visiting Newrome when the Great White came. Jacob’s journal made it clear that she had been a good deal further away than Newrome. Which meant that I, too, had been wrong in my speculation that Rushton had been one of Hannah’s descendants because they shared the same second name.

Unless Hannah had eventually made her way back to the Land in an attempt to fulfil her promise to Jacob. It might be so, for had not Cassy made a vast journey with the Beforetime Misfits to the Land after the Great White? It was a queer thing to imagine that Cassandra and Hannah might both have come back to the Land, without either knowing the other had returned. Of course, if they had, one or both would surely have futuretold the presence of the other. Besides, there had never been anything to suggest they had met again after the Great White.

I rolled onto my belly, thinking that if Hannah had come to the Land and borne a child, she would have had to come much sooner than Cassy, since the latter had grown to womanhood in the Red Land. The one time I had dreamed of Hannah it had been in the Beforetime and she had been perhaps five and thirty. If she had waited the same length of time as Cassy had before returning to the Land, she would have been too old to bear children. Indeed, even if she had travelled straight to the Land, she would have had to meet and bond with a man very quickly to bear a child, and that in the midst of all the upheavals and dangers of the Age of Chaos.