Could not bring that proud soul under;

The harp he lov’d ne’er spoke again,

For he tore its chords asunder;

Anna turned away from him, playing to another audience, someone … something other than them.

“She’s singing,” Tag said, sounding worried. “Can you hear it? How is she doing that? Should we stop her?”

“Yes,” said Charles, but he made no move to do so.

And said, “No chains shall sully thee,

Thou soul of love and bravery!

Thy songs were made for the pure and free,

They shall never sound in slavery.”

The words echoed, and the music was amplified by the natural acoustics of the amphitheater into something much more powerful than a musician should have been able to get out of a little recorder. Even a musician as good as his Anna.

Driven by the urgent feeling that something was wrong, Charles started to move toward her. It felt like slogging through mud. Only then did he realize he’d been caught in the music, too. There had been magic at work—though, he thought with grim self-directed anger, that revelation should have hit him when he’d heard, impossibly, the words of her song.

The magic had lessened when she’d quit singing, having finished all the lyrics. The sweet voice of the recorder continued as Anna played variations on “The Minstrel Boy.” He needed to get to her before she found another song; he was fairly sure when she found one, they would be caught in its spell again.

He had to free her.

“I can’t move,” said Tag tightly, berserker rage shadowing his voice, making it rasp.

“Wait there,” Charles told him with authority he hoped Tag could hold on to. In a gentler voice he said, “Anna, love, put the recorder down. The song is over, the last verse sung.”

She ignored him.

She can’t hear us, Brother Wolf told him.

He wanted to see her face. He had to wade through the sticky magic to get to her—it wasn’t only Tag who was riding an edge. Since she hadn’t responded to his voice at all, he changed tactics.

“Anna,” he barked. He tried reaching through their mating bond again; he’d been trying to touch her through it since she’d started playing. If she felt him, he could not tell.

Fight fire with fire, suggested Brother Wolf, though not in words. Instead, Charles got a vision of a backfire lit in the path of a blazing forest. Sing.