Initially there was no response. Then Lord Amberhill’s hands struck out and grabbed Yap’s shirt and pulled him down as Yap cried out in surprise. Lord Amberhill’s eyelids peeled back, and his irises, usually a striking light gray, were clouded, smoky.

“You do not command me!” His voice was strange, lower, harsher, not at all the refined manner Yap remembered. “Do you hear me?” Lord Amberhill demanded.

“Aye, sir! I hear ya!”

As quickly as the outburst had come, it dissipated. Lord Amberhill’s hands dropped back down to his chest, and his eyes closed, and once again he rested at peace.

He saw the man standing over him in wavery ripples. It was like looking through water.

But Amberhill was not in water. He was pretty sure about that. He had been, but his present existence felt warm and dry. He reached out and felt a rough fur blanketing him. He closed his eyes thinking he should know the man. One part of him thought so, anyway, and another part said, “stranger.” He wasn’t sure if he remembered who he was himself—king or serf, farmer or fisherman.

Beneath the surface of wakefulness, it was not all dark, nor was he alone. Not far off were the slumbering shadows of those whose dreams leaked into his own. Dreams of soaring high above the land and swimming the depths of the sea. Of burrowing into the earth. Their desires became his, and he sensed their great power, their strength and ferocity, they, the changers of worlds. He felt himself drawn to reach out to them, to touch them, though he feared them. But they slept, and so must he.

He drifted until he settled into the still of dark.

BRIMMING WITH SECRETS

Karigan kept gazing into the shard of the looking mask in hopes of seeing something of her own time, but try as she might, she saw no new visions.

She concealed the fragment beneath her pillow when Lorine knocked on the door to help her prepare for supper. Supper entailed another change of clothes into a more formal black and gray affair. It seemed a waste when she realized she’d be dining alone at the big table, with only the company of the servants waiting on her. The professor, apparently, was still out and attending to his duties. She felt conspicuous and out of place, and ate as quickly as good manners permitted, retreating to her room when she finished.

She changed into her comfortable nightgown, doomed to wait again till it was time to meet the professor. She did so, pacing as dark gathered outside her window. Mirriam poked her head in to check on her and to ensure she was ready for bed. Karigan obediently climbed in beneath the covers and turned off her lamp. Mirriam made a grunt of approval and left.

Just like when I was a child being raised by my aunts, Karigan thought a little resentfully. It was difficult enough to lose her freedom as a female, much less as an adult, but it was the façade she must maintain for now.

And so she waited for the house to quiet down, her eyelids drooping. She kept shaking herself awake, and eventually crept to her door and listened as the household settled down for the night. This time when she slipped out, shawl once more draped across her shoulders and bonewood in hand, she had a much better feel for the layout of the house, and in the dim light, picked her way down to the library without hesitation.

She found the professor sitting in the glow of the low lamplight, a book open on the table before him. He glanced up as she entered.

“Ah, good evening,” he said in a quiet voice. “My apologies for missing supper, but I had some details to attend to at the university. Are you ready?”

Karigan nodded, and he closed the book. He extinguished the lamp and, taking up a taper, gave the dragon statuette on its shelf a twist of its tail, opening the secret passage. Neither of them spoke until they were securely through the second door and on the spiral stairs winding their way downward.

“Er, you have nothing else to wear down here than your nightgown and slippers?”

“The dresses you had made for me are very fine,” Karigan said, “but too fine. Mirriam would have a fit if I got dirt on them. The nightgown is bad enough.”

“I see,” the professor said. “I had not thought of that. She is, you see, accustomed to dirt on me.” His chuckle was muffled in the close confines of the shaft that contained the stairway. The taper he carried, bobbing up and down, cast weird shadows on the rough stone walls.

“Which brings up something else,” Karigan said. “Mirriam will not tolerate my visiting Raven at the stables, and she especially won’t tolerate my riding him.”

“Do you know that Arhys now demands a stallion of her own?”

“I . . . heard something about that,” Karigan replied, recalling the ruckus outside the bathing room earlier in the day. “I need to spend time with Raven, even if it causes trouble. I hate to draw attention, but I will if I have to.”

“Yes, yes, I do not doubt it. I have gathered there is a certain willfulness of character about you. And yet it does not come from a spoiled place as it does with Arhys. I grasp that Green Riders were great horsemen and that it in part came from love of their steeds.”

Were. She tugged her shawl more closely against the chill of the stairwell. She still could not think of her friends in the past tense. They remained alive to her, robust and carrying on their duties as Riders. To her it was more like they were somewhere rather than somewhen.

“Let me think on it, my dear, and see if we can’t come up with a solution that won’t tax poor Mirriam’s propriety or draw unnecessary attention to you or my household.”

“Thank you,” Karigan said. She’d have to be satisfied with his response for now but promised herself that even if he found no acceptable solution, she’d find one of her own. And, she thought, if the professor gave her enough information tonight about what had happened to Sacor City, she could work harder at finding a way to deliver that information home to her own time. It might mean that fitting in with this world would eventually become unnecessary.