"Nice room," I heard Galilee say behind me.

There was an ironic edge to the remark, no doubt; he obviously thought I'd overestimated the miraculous nature of the place. I didn't offer any kind of defense. I just held my breath. A few seconds passed. The quill-pig had quieted in my arms. Curious, I thought. I let the held breath go, albeit slowly. Still nothing.

"Are you sure-" Galilee began.

"Hush."

It was not me who silenced him, it was Rachel. I heard her footsteps behind me, and from the corner of my eye saw her walking on past me into the room. She'd left Galilee's side. In other circumstances I might have glanced back over my shoulder and called him a coward, but the moment was too fraught for me to risk the distraction. I kept my gaze fixed on Rachel as she wandered toward the center of the room. That hush of hers had come because she'd heard something; but what? All I could hear was the sound of our breathing, and the padding of Rachel's soles on the bare boards. Still, she was clearly attending to some sound or other. She cocked her head slightly, as if she wasn't quite sure whether she was really hearing this sound or not. And now, as she listened, I caught what she was straining to hear. It was the softest of sounds: a sibilant murmuring, so quiet I might have assumed it was the hum of my blood, had it not also been audible to Rachel.

She looked down at her feet. I followed her gaze, and saw that a subtle change had overtaken the boards. The cracks were being erased, and the details of each board, the grain and the knotholes, were shifting. Rachel could obviously feel the effect of this shift against the tips of her toes: the flow of the motion was toward her, out of the heart of the room.

Now I put the sound I was hearing together with the shifting of the boards: the wood was becoming sand; sand blown by a gentle but insistent breeze.

Rachel glanced back toward me. To judge by her expression she wasn't so much alarmed by what was happening as entertained.

"Look," she said. Then, to Galilee, "It's okay, honey." She reached out toward him, and he came to join her, sliding an anxious glance in my direction as he did so. The wind was getting stronger; the boards had now disappeared completely. There was only sand beneath our feet now, its grains glittering as they rolled on their way.

I watched him reach out to take hold of her hand, wondering what place this was, creeping up upon us. The walls across the room had melted away into a gray-blue haze; and I cast my eyes heavenward to see that the dome had also faded from view. There were stars up there, where there'd been a solid vault of timber and plaster. The dark between them was deepening, and their pinpricks growing brighter, even as I watched. For a few giddying heartbeats it seemed I was falling toward them. I returned my gaze to Rachel and Galilee before the illusion caught hold of me; and as I did so the lovers' fingers intertwined.

I felt a subtle shock pass through me, and Tansy jumped out of my arms, landing on the sand in front of me. I went down on my haunches to see that no harm had come to her-strange, I suppose, but there was some comfort in concerning myself with the animal's welfare when the ground was being remade underfoot, and the stars burning too bright above. But Tansy wanted none of my help now. She was off before I could touch her, with that comical rolling gait of hers. I watched her go perhaps three yards from me before lifting my eyes. What I saw when I did so put the thought of her out of my head completely.

There was no apocalyptic scene before me; no vaults of fire, no panicking animals. There was instead a landscape that I knew. I'd never walked there, except in my imagination, but perhaps I knew it all the better for that fact.

Off to my right was a forest, thick and dark. And to my left, the lisping waters of the Caspian Sea.

Two souls as old as heaven came down to the shore that ancient noon …

This was the place where the holy family had walked; where Zelim the fisherman had left his bickering comrades and gone to engage in a conversation that would not only change his life, but the life that he lived after death. The place of beginnings.

There was no harm here, I thought to myself. There was just the wind and the sand and the sea. I looked back toward the door; or rather the spot where the door had stood. It had gone. There was no way out of here, back into the house. Nor was there any sign of Cesaria's presence along the shore. I thought I could see some hint of habitation in the distant dunes-a new Atva, perhaps, or the old-and there was the skeletal remains of a boat, the bones of its hull black in the starlight, a distance away, but of the woman we'd come here to see, not a sign.

"Where the hell are we?" Galilee wondered aloud.

"This is where you were baptized," I told him.

"Really?" He looked out toward the placid water. "Where I tried to swim away?"

"That's right."

"How far did you get?" Rachel asked him.

I didn't hear his response. My attention was once again upon the porcupine, who having waddled away some distance had now turned round, and with her nose to the sand, was snuffling her way toward the carcass of the boat. Halfway there, she raised her head, made a small noise in her throat, and quickened her pace. She wasn't sniffing her way any longer: she knew her destination. Somebody was waiting for us in the shadows of the vessel.

"Galilee…?" I murmured.

He looked my way, and I pointed along the shore. There-sitting in the boat-was the storm-maker, the virago herself, a scarf of dark silk draped over her head.

"You see her?" I murmured.

"I see," he said. Then, more quietly. "You go first."

I didn't argue. My anxiety had faded, calmed by the tranquillity of the scene. There would be no great unleash-ings here, I sensed; no forces raging around. Of course that probably meant that my hopes of being raised out of half-breed state were dashed. But nor would I come to any harm.

Following Tansy's tracks in the sand, I approached the boat. The starlight was no longer brightening, but its benediction showed me Cesaria dearly enough, sitting there on a pile of timbers, looking my way. With the ribs of the wreck rising to either side of her she looked as though she were sitting at the heart of a dark flower.

L'Enfants… she said to us… you took your time.

Tansy was at her feet. She bent down and the creature clambered up into her embrace, where it perched in grunting bliss.

"We looked for you downstairs…" I began to explain.

I won't be going back there, she said. I've shed too many tears down there. And now I'm done.

She hadn't taken her eyes off me since we'd started toward her. It was almost as though she didn't want to look past me toward her son; didn't dare, perhaps, for fear of shedding the very tears she said she was done with. I could see how dose they were; how full of feeling she was.

"Is there something you need from me?" I asked her.

No, Maddox, she said, with sweet gravity. There's nothing now. You've done more than enough, child.

Child. There'd been a time when she'd enraged me with that word. Now it was wonderful. I was a child, still. My life, she seemed to say, was still to be lived.

You should go, she said.

"Where?"

Through the forest, she said. The way Zelim went.

I didn't move. Though I'd heard the instruction, I couldn't bring myself to leave. After all my trepidation, all my fears of what being in her presence might bring, I wanted to stay a moment longer, two moments, three, to enjoy the balm of her eyes and the honey of her voice. It was only with the greatest difficulty that I made my limbs obey me, and turn me toward the trees.