It was night and a figure was standing on top of a crag of stone looking down into a shadowy defile where two people walked, one behind the other. For a moment I was so astonished at the figure that I hardly noticed the people below, for it was the same scarlet-winged wolfman spirit that had saved me from the Destroyer when I was dreamtravelling and which, if Straaka was right, had summoned me to the high spirit realm where he had waited with a message from the merged spirits of the oldOnes.

Dazedly, I wondered if what I was seeing was not a memory but a vision Gavyn had experienced. Or perhaps the spirit-form had entered the boy’s sleeping spirit, but to what end?

The wolfman began to leap with singular grace along the sharp crags, flapping his scarlet wings just enough to keep himself in the air when the gap was wide. He seemed utterly unaware of me, and his attention was so strongly focused on the people in the canyon below that I was compelled to look down, too. A tall, powerfully built man was walking behind a smaller man.

I found myself drifting closer to the pair and suddenly I saw with horror that the man held a rope, the other end of which was fastened around the smaller man’s neck. The wind gave a great sighing gust and a flag of hair fluttered back from the smaller figure, whom I realised was a girl. Overhead the clouds shifted and moonlight speared down into the ravine to illuminate the girl’s face.

It was Dragon.

Her beauty was unmistakable, despite the fact that her face was a mottled mass of bruising and filth. I was so shocked by the sight of her that I would have lost my connection to the dream or vision, had not Rasial’s grip on me been so steadfast.

Dragon was so bedraggled and filthy that she might still have been the feral child I had lured from the Beforetime ruins on the west coast and brought back to Obernewtyn. But the torn and tattered rags she wore revealed all too clearly that she was a child no longer. She turned to look back at her captor and her expression twisted into a grimace of terror and loathing so extreme that she looked half mad.

The man gave the rope a vicious jerk and Dragon was wrenched backwards so hard that she lost her footing. She fell and rolled until the rope around her neck brought her to a brutal halt. She would likely have been throttled if she had not been walking with one hand hooked through the loop under her chin. This told me that the man had wrenched her like that often enough that she had learned to protect herself.