I give the house a look, but there still doesn’t seem to be anybody stirring there.

“Has that place got something to do with this?” Lizzie asks.

“It’s where it all started,” I tell her.

Then we all sit down in the grass under the tree and that old oak of mine gets to hear my story all over again.

Rabedy Collins

The mists had drawn back a little when Rabedy arrived on the seashore with Odawa at his side, but otherwise the beach was much the same. A grey and dismal place that smelled of fish and algae. The doonie’s hoof prints still began abruptly and ended as they had before, although this time there was the addition of the tracks that Rabedy and the others had left. In time, no trace of them would remain, for the tide was coming in and already washing onto the prints, softening their edges.

“Take me to where their trail ends,” the green-bree said.

He put a hand on Rabedy’s shoulder, as he had when they crossed over from the Aisling’s Wood. Rabedy shivered, disliking the touch as much now as he had before. And why was it that Odawa hadn’t needed this sort of help before?

“Are you really blind?” Rabedy asked.

“Yes. But I’m old and my medicine is potent. It allows me to compensate. While I can’t physically see as you do, and I can’t sense details, I can usually get by.”

“Medicine . . . that’s what we call magic.”

“It is and it isn’t. There are parts of it that reside in ourselves, that come with our blood, but mostly it’s power we borrow from the spirits.”

“This is where the trail ends,” Rabedy said.

Odawa let go of the bogan’s shoulder and moved his hands back and forth in the air, feeling for the doonie’s trail.

“What do you sense here?” he asked Rabedy.

The blind gaze turned to look at the bogan, finding his face with no trouble.

Rabedy closed his eyes, as much to not have to look into those milky eyes as to concentrate.

“Access to anywhere,” he said. “A thousand roads.”

“And the doonie? Where did he go?”

Rabedy concentrated again.

“He’s just gone,” he said, surprised.

Normally a passage between the worlds left some residue, some hint of where one’s quarry had gone. But here, there was nothing.

“I get the same,” Odawa said. “They’ve vanished into a hidden world, and there’ll be no following them now.”

Rabedy waited a moment, then asked, “Does it really matter that much?”

“Who’s the blind one here?”

Rabedy shrugged, then realized the green-bree couldn’t see the gesture.

“I understand vengeance,” he said, “but unlike some of my kind, I don’t understand cruelty.”

“You think me cruel?”

“What would you call what you do?”

“He blinded me.”