“I’m not cool at all. I’m a geek, remember? Someone to get essays from.”

Ned shook his head. “No.”

He left it at that, turned away again. After a moment she said, in a different voice, “Well, thank you. But don’t you think this sweatshirt makes me look fat?”

Ned laughed aloud.

Kate was grinning.

“Yeah, McGill hoodies tend to. Everyone knows that.” He took a chance. “I saw you last night, remember? All legs.”

She chose to ignore that. “What’s McGill?”

“Main university in Montreal.”

“You going there?”

“Might. Probably. Haven’t thought about it a lot. Thinking less about it just now.”

“Yeah, I’m sure.”

They heard a sound to their right.

Ned turned quickly. In the fading light he saw an owl flying north along the upslope of the hill behind the house. The bird was awkward, labouring, fighting to climb.

They watched it. For no reason he could have explained, Ned felt a lump in his throat. It was Cadell, of course, defiantly forcing himself to take wing despite a wound. Refusing to acknowledge what had been done to him, that it could change anything, make him behave differently.

“He’ll…he’s going to have to land,” Kate said. Her voice was rough. “Change back.”

Ned nodded. “I know. He’ll wait till he’s out of sight if it kills him.”

They were silent, watching the bird struggle. They lost it, then Ned saw it again. Its left wing seemed to be hardly moving, though it was difficult to see in the last light, and that might just have been his knowing where the blade had gone.

After another moment the owl passed from sight, cresting the hill.

“He didn’t have to do that,” Kate Wenger said softly.

“Yeah, he did,” Ned replied.

She glared at him again. “Your aunt,” she said, with more anger than seemed called for, “was right, then. Men are idiots.”

“I try not to be,” Ned said.

“Don’t even start with me, Ned Marriner.”

A presence, a voice behind them. “Be fair. He hasn’t done too badly.”

Phelan walked up.

“We didn’t hear you,” Kate said.

The man they’d first seen in the baptistry shrugged a shoulder. The other would be bandaged, Ned knew, under the jacket. The jacket would be torn. It was too dark to make that out.

“I’ve had time to learn how not to be heard,” Phelan said. “I came to say goodbye.”

“Well brought up?” Kate said.

“Once, yes.” He hesitated. “In Phocaia.”

“I know. I looked it up. Eastern Greece. But your name wasn’t Protis?”

He shook his head.

“You can remember being young?” Ned asked.

Another hesitation. He was being kind to them, Ned realized.

“You never forget being young,” he said. Then, “Do you have anything for me? Anything at all?”

A great deal of pride being overcome to ask that. Ned shook his head. “I’d have told you both, if I had.”

He thought the other man’s expression was pained, but that was probably his imagination. The bands of colour were almost gone in the west.

“I thought you might…”

“Be on your side?”

Phelan nodded. “You were, in the café.”

“You didn’t need me,” Ned said. “You said I was stupid to come out, remember?”

“I remember.” His teeth flashed briefly. “Men are idiots?”

“Yeah. You heard that?” Kate said.

He nodded again. “Inside and out here. A body of opinion, it seems.”

“How’s your shoulder?” Kate asked.

“Same as his, I imagine.”

“But you don’t need to fly.”

“I don’t, no.”

“You do the screening thing, though, right?” Ned said. “You told me about that. Then you did it at Entremont.”

“I did learn it, eventually, yes. As he learned the shape-changing.”

“Why him, not you?”

A hint of impatience for the first time. “Why did they have druids and keep their elders’ skulls, and their enemies’, and believe the sky would fall to end the world?”

Ned said nothing.

“Why did we build aqueducts and cities? And theatres? And arenas and baths and the roads?”

“I get it. Why did you conquer them? Make them slaves?” That was Kate.

“Why were we able to do that?”

“What are you saying? Different ideas of the world?” Ned asked.

Phelan nodded. He turned to Kate. “He isn’t an idiot, by the way.”

“Never said he was,” she retorted.

Phelan opened his mouth to reply, but didn’t. He looked at Ned again. “Different ideas, different avenues to power. You’ve learned how to screen yourself?”

Ned nodded. “Just now.”

“Remember to let it go unless you need it. You’re still hidden. You don’t need to be. It will kick back on you if you hold too long. You can harm yourself. I learned the hard way.”

“Seriously?” Dumb question.

Phelan nodded. “It drains you, takes a fair amount of energy, though you don’t even know it.”

Hesitantly, Ned closed his eyes, looked within again, saw the silver light that was the man he was talking to and the green-gold of his aunt up in the house. Cadell’s presence was too far away now, or blocked.

He released his own, like opening fingers in his mind, and saw his own pale hue reappear inside.

“Ah,” Phelan said. “There you are. I’ll leave now. This is”—he looked from one of them to the other—“farewell, I suspect. I will say that I am grateful—for the café, for Entremont.”

“You saved us up there,” Kate said.

He shook his head. “He was unlikely to have hurt you, with Ysabel watching.”

“The others might have, and it was Beltaine,” Kate said stubbornly.

Phelan shrugged again, with one shoulder. “So be it. I saved your lives. Doesn’t make me a good man.”

“I know that,” Ned said.

Phelan looked at him for a long moment.

“You must understand, I have…no balancing in this,” he said quietly, in the near-dark. “The air I breathe is her, or wanting her.”

Ned was silent. He felt something pushing from inside himself, a kind of wish, longing. Last encounter, an ending, a world touched and receding.

He heard himself say, “I sensed her in the cemetery. No idea from when. It might have been long ago like the other place, but I did feel her.”

Phelan’s attention was suddenly absolute. “Ysabel herself, not just a sensation?”

Ned nodded. “Ysabel.”

Saying the name himself.

The man’s head lifted. He was looking down the valley, as if trying to see as far as Arles. He was a grey shape in moonlight, going away from them. The villa’s lights were across the grass, up the stone steps, gleaming through windows, far away from where they stood.

“That would have been her now, if so. She knew Les Alyscamps. We all did.”

“What does it tell you?” Kate asked, an edge in her voice. She knows he’s leaving, too, Ned thought. This world they’d found.

“One thing or two,” Phelan said. He looked at Ned. “Thank you, again.”

“I’m not sure why I did that.”

“Neither am I,” Phelan said. “Because he cheated?”

“I cheat on things,” Ned said. “I even took an essay from…” He didn’t finish. It seemed too dismally stupid a thought.

He saw white teeth in the darkness. “Perhaps I charmed you with my sweetness?” Phelan laughed. He shook his head. “I’m away. Remember me, if this is the end.”

He turned and started back across the grass. Ned discovered he was unable to speak.

“How are you going to…How did you get here?” Kate again.

Ned had a sense—same as in the cloister—that she was trying to keep him here, hold him with questions, not release him into the night.

“You’ll hear,” Phelan said, without turning back. He hadn’t turned back in the cloister, either.

They watched him go past the pool and the lavender to the iron gates. They were closed and locked. The motion sensors kicked on as he approached, so they had a sudden view as he put both arms—one would be bandaged, with a blade wound—on the bars, and then propelled himself over without fuss, with an ease that seemed absurd, in fact.