‘Isn’t what the wolf saw likely to mean that he will die in the city?’ Swallow suggested.

‘It might mean anything,’ I said impatiently. ‘The point I am trying to make is that the way I will go will be perilous. Knowing this, you must decide for yourselves whether or not you will go with me.’

‘The wolf saw us travelling with the pack?’ Ahmedri asked, before anyone else could speak. I nodded reluctantly. He shrugged. ‘Then we know what we chose.’

There was a finality in the tribesman’s words that silenced us, and when he went to his grey mare, Swallow went too and began to check the fastenings on the packs and saddlebags while Analivia looked around the campsite to make sure we had left nothing behind. The owl flapped away and Gavyn wandered back down to the lake to watch her circling it, with Rasial as his pale shadow.

I noticed Dameon stood facing them and I suddenly remembered that I had meant to ask the empath about the pair when he returned to Obernewtyn. ‘What do you feel when you are close to Rasial and Gavyn?’ I asked him softly.

‘In truth it is very hard to feel anything about one or the other, because their emotions overlap so intimately.’ He nodded towards the lake. ‘I know from the reactions of the others that this Skylake is beautiful to look upon and yet somehow I do not like the feel of it.’

‘You are wise and sensitive, my friend,’ I said. ‘The lake was once a storage place for deadly Beforetime weapons. In a past-dream, I saw great flat doors where the lake now stands. They opened and weapons flew out like a flock of deadly birds. The doors did not close again and I think gradually the rain made a lake of the opening, drowning all that lay beneath.’

Dameon said nothing, and I wondered why he had been dragged into my quest. Or any of them, save maybe Swallow. The tribesman was canny enough but he had his own reasons for travelling that had nothing to do with my quest. Analivia was clever and quick witted but she had no Talents, and Gavyn was a strange, distant boy with little ability to relate to human beings let alone the wit to understand what I was trying to do. What had the oldOnes been thinking when they had summoned these five?

‘They come,’ Maruman sent, and I looked up to see the wolf pack flowing around the rim of the mist-swathed lake towards us, fur in all shades from white to dark grey, limned silver at the tip by moonlight, their eyes shining pale with a flash of red at the centre. They were so beautiful and terrible that my skin rose up into goose flesh.

Chapter 23

23