And what was the point, anyhow? Did they wander the streets calling her name like someone looking for a lost cat? And which name, even? Melanie or Ysabel?

It was Steve, surprisingly, who’d nailed him on this last night.

Steve’s attitude had changed almost completely, right after Greg had added his voice to Ned’s, explaining the events on the road, including the druid’s long-range flattening of him. Greg had credibility, it seemed. Came with a bruised sternum. And he hadn’t even seen Cadell change into an owl, Ned thought.

Ned had seen it. Twice, now. What did you do with that memory?

Steve had said, from by the terrace doors, “Ned, if we don’t have anything better, this is what we do, man. If we find her, we figure out a next step. We’re not going to just sit here, are we? Or go around taking photos as if nothing’s happened?”

“No, we’re not going to do that,” Edward Marriner had said.

“And it makes no sense to be pessimistic,” Greg added, sitting a little stiffly on a dining-room chair. “I mean, this whole thing is so off the wall, why shouldn’t we do something off the wall and fix it, eh?”

Ned looked at him.

“You sound like Melanie,” he said.

Greg hadn’t smiled. “Someone has to, I guess,” was what he’d said.

Ned was thinking about that, too, as they continued north towards the sharp-edged mountains, passing tourist signs for a place called Les Baux. What did Melanie sound like? How did she think? What was there about her that he could try to sense, or locate?

Or did that even matter? Was it more a question of thinking about Ysabel, instead, reborn into the world so many times? So dangerously beautiful it could scare you. He did get scared, in fact, remembering how he’d felt last night, looking at her, hearing that voice.

Or maybe it was the two men, maybe they were what he should be searching for, inwardly? But what was the point? It was pretty clear they had no clue where she was—that was the whole idea of the challenge she’d set them. That’s why Cadell and the druid had come looking for Ned, wasn’t it?

He considered that for a bit. They drove past a farm with horses and donkeys in a meadow on their left. There were plane trees along a dead-straight east-west road they crossed. Another sign pointed the way to a golf course.

“She wants them to find her,” he said.

His father turned around in the front seat.

Edward Marriner had insisted on being with his son today. It made sense, anyhow. Ned and Aunt Kim had to be in different cars. Kate was with Kim because she was the only one besides Ned who could recognize Ysabel—or Phelan, for that matter. Steve went with the two of them, as protection, for what that was worth. Ned had his dad and Greg.

His mother had phoned very early. She was taking a military plane from Darfur to Khartoum, then a flight to Paris and connecting to Marseille. She’d be with them by dinnertime.

“What do you mean, she wants them to?” Edward Marriner asked. His father looked older this morning, Ned thought. A worried man, lines creasing his forehead, circles under his eyes. He probably hadn’t slept much either.

Ned shrugged. “Nothing brilliant. Think about it. Ysabel doesn’t want to stay lost. This is a test for them, not mission impossible. She’s choosing, not hiding.”

“Which means what?” Greg asked, eyes meeting Ned’s in the rear-view mirror.

“Means Aunt Kim’s right, maybe,” Ned said. “There should be a way to find some place that…connects up. Or makes sense. I mean, they have to do it, so we can too, right? There has to be some logic to it?”

“Well, it would be easier if we could narrow it to a bit less than twenty-five hundred years,” his father said.

“Now you sound like me last night,” Ned said.

Greg snorted.

“God and His angels forfend,” his father said, and turned back to watch the road.

Edward Marriner was carrying two cameras, a digital and an SLR. More for comfort, Ned thought, than anything else. It had occurred to him, getting into the van, that on the viewfinder side of a camera you had a buffer between you and the world.

There were a lot of ideas coming to him these days for the first time. Looking out the window, he saw the turnoff for Les Baux coming up. Traffic slowed as cars made the left.

“Straight on, Gregory,” Edward Marriner said, checking the map.

“Road goes to Saint-Rémy, we pull off just before.”

“I got it,” Greg said. “It’s on the signs.”

“What is that?” Ned asked. “Up there? Les Baux?”

“Medieval hill town, castle ruins. Pretty spectacular.”

“You’ve been?”

“With your mother, before you were born.”

“On our list?”

“Not for this. Oliver and Barrett have it down for the book. Though it probably could be for this, too. Best I gather, the Celts were all over this place before the Romans came.”

“It’s way up there,” Greg said. “Look close.”

They were waiting for the cars ahead of them to turn. Ned looked out the left-side window. What appeared at first to be crumbled rock was actually the smashed-up remains of a long castle wall at the top of the mountain. It blended in almost perfectly.

“Wow,” he said.

His father was looking too. “They used to throw their enemies from those walls, the story goes.”

“Nice of them. When?”

“Medieval times. The Lords of Les Baux they were called. Louis XIII sent cannons up to the castle a few hundred years after. Blew it apart. Thought it was too dangerous for local lords to have a fortress that strong.”

Ned shook his head. The Romans with siege engines at Entremont, same thing here with cannons.

“I thought you told me we were coming to a beautiful, peaceful place.”

His father glanced back. “I’m sure I told you beautiful. I doubt I was so foolish as to say peaceful.”

“Besides,” Greg said in a joking voice, “when do fifteen-year-old dudes want it peaceful?”

“Could use some about now,” Ned said.

They came up to the intersection, waited for the car ahead to go left, and carried on through.

“This next bit here’s called the Valley of Hell,” Edward Marriner said. “Melanie has a note it may have inspired Dante.” He had her notebook, among the other papers he was carrying.

“He was here too?” Greg asked.

“Everyone was here,” Ned’s father replied. “That’s sort of the point. There were popes in Avignon for a while, long story. Dante was an emissary at one time.”

“I can see it,” Ned heard Greg saying. “Valley of Hell, I mean. Look at those boulders.” The landscape had become harsh and barren quite suddenly as they wound a narrow route between cliffs. A few splashes of colour from wildflowers seemed to emphasize, not reduce, the bleakness. It was darker, the cliffs hiding the sun. It felt lonely and desolate. Looking around, Ned began to feel uneasy.

“Barrett has this place down too,” Edward Marriner was saying.

“For the landscape. Another side of Provence.”

But his voice had retreated, seemed somehow farther than the front seat. There was something else, inside, pushing it away. Ned took a deep breath, fighting panic. He didn’t feel ill, not like at Sainte-Victoire, but he did feel…distant. And really odd.

“Can you stop for a second?” he said.

Without hesitation, without a word, Greg swerved the van onto the shoulder, which was not all that wide. The driver behind them—close behind them—blasted his horn and shot past. Greg came to a hard stop.

“What is it? Ned?”

His father had turned again and was looking at him. The expression on his face, a mixture of fear and awe, was unsettling. A father shouldn’t have to look at his kid like that, Ned thought.

“Feeling something,” he muttered.

He searched inwardly. Nothing tangible—only a disquiet, like a pulsebeat, a faint drumming.

“Does…do we have anything on what’s here? What might have been around this place?”