Chane released his sword and rolled, pinning the dog beneath his back, but it did not let go. He felt his skin tear as he wrenched his elbow back. The dog's jaws released with a gagging yelp at the muffled crack of its ribs. Chane turned onto his knees, pinned the dog's head, and shattered its skull with his fist.

His horse was down. Four remaining dogs tore savagely at it, and the mount's weak cries reduced to gasping whimpers.

All the dogs suddenly stopped and fell silent. Their bloodied muzzles lifted in unison.

Welstiel stood beyond them, the reins of his horse in hand. His expression was marred with livid disbelief.

"Why did you not stop them," he demanded, "instead of rolling about yourself like some rabid mongrel?"

"I was stopping…" Chane answered in his nearly voiceless hiss. "There were too many to get all of them quickly enough."

"You are Noble Dead," Welstiel said with disgust. "You can control such beasts with a thought."

Chane blinked. "I do not possess that ability. Toret told me that ourkind develop differing strengths-given time. That is not one of mine."

Welstiel's disgust faded, and he shook his head. His resignation made him look older.

"Yes… it is." He studied the dogs and then Chane's chest. "Do you still wear one of your small urns?"

Chane grasped the leather string slick with his own black fluids still running down his neck. He pulled it until a small brass urn dangled free of his shirt.

Welstiel stepped closer and the dogs remained still as he passed. "Leave one alive to take as a familiar. It can track ahead and perhaps aid in our search."

He turned away, glancing once at the dying horse with a weary sigh.

It was a sound Chane always found strange to hear from an undead, even when he did it himself. They breathed only when needing to speak, and a sigh was but a habit left over from living days.

"We'll walk and use my horse for the baggage," Welstiel said. "Collect what remains of your horse's feed, and roast its flesh to store for your new familiar."

Chane picked up his sword. It all sounded sensible and rational, but the scent of blood was thick around him. His hunger stirred, though he had no need for sustenance.

Dog and horse-lowly beasts-but the mount had served Chane, and the pack only sought to survive. He understood that, and it left him strangely disturbed as he skewered the first dog with the tip of his blade. Even at its yelp, the others just stood there, waiting to be slaughtered.

He did not pick or choose and merely killed the dogs one by one within reach, until the last stood cowering before him. He closed his eyes and imagined once more…

A quiet place in the world where Wynn's round face glowed by the light of a cold lamp crystal. Her eyes drooped in sleep over the parchment, and he reached out for her…

Wynn returned with Chap and Lily to the barrier woods. The silver deer was gone, but the remainder of the pack ranged about.

Her face and hands stung from scratches, and her left leg ached, but she limped along. These injuries seemed paltry compared to the majay-hi found broken and dead beneath the birch's branches. The steel-gray female had come for her as the Fay tried to drag her out to her death. Now her twin brother wandered listlessly among the trees, barely in sight of the others.

Of all things Wynn had faced, from vampires to Lord Darmouth and his men, the Fay's sudden wrath terrified her most. It was so unexpected.

Before discovering Chap, she had considered the Fay to be little more than an ideological personification of the elemental forces that composed her world. In knowing Chap and coming to believe in what he was, she had thought the Fay benevolent if enigmatic, much like him.

They had killed a majay-hi because she had heard them and learned how they had used Chap.

The world now made far less sense to Wynn.

Chap stepped up to the brambles filling the trees of the barrier woods. He ground his paws into the earth. Wynn did not need mantic sight to guess what he did.

She had seen the silken vapor of spectral white fire rise around Chap as he faced his kin. When he turned on them to defend her, his body had flashed and blinded her for an instant. His kin had fled in fear.

He annoyed her so many times with his doggish behavior, slovenly and gluttonous habits that made it difficult to remember what he was. When he chomped a greasy sausage, she did not see how anything descended from the eternal could be so… disgusting.

But he was Fay-and now outcast. Perhaps traitor as well to his eternal kin, though they deserved no better.

Chap clamped his teeth upon a bisselberry vine, and Wynn watched in chilled fascination.

Round berries receded to flowers and then to small buds among the vine's broad leaves and long thorns. Leaves shrank in size and thorns shortened as both faded into light green stems. The vine's branching parts withdrew as they shrank in size.

Wynn watched its wild maturity turn back to infancy as the thorny plant grew younger and smaller. It receded into the earth from whatever fallow seed it had sprouted.

"You reverse the course of life?" Wynn whispered.

Chap stepped into the hollow left by the vines, and the leaf-wing whispered in Wynn's head.

Only to take my kin's touch… what they leave of their will upon the world… as I took the pieces of them reaching for you.

She had grown accustomed to picking meaning from his multitongued voice, though it still made her stomach roll. The inky elder followed Chap inward. Wynn stepped in with Lily, and the other majay-hi came behind.

Dawn grew to day as Chap led them, tunneling through the barrier woods. Wynn watched in awe as again and again he bit and licked its altered life into retreat. The sun had nearly cleared the treetops when the last bramble curled away before Chap. Wynn stepped out behind him through a patch of enormous verdant ferns with fronds reaching up taller than her head.

She emerged at a clearing's edge where the ground was covered in soft emerald grass. Here and there patches of darker moss were thick and spongy. At the center was a domicile elm as wide and massive as any oak or cedar in Crijheaiche.Beside its curtained opening sat a stool and a basket filled with white lumps. A small brook gurgled across the clearing several paces beyond the tree.

At the water's edge, a slender woman perched upon a wide saffron cushion. With her back turned, she did not notice the visitors.

Bright sunlight turned her hair nearly white, and its long glossy tresses hung forward over one caramel-colored shoulder. The folds of her shimmering wrap were pulled down, and she was naked to the waist. She washed with a square of tan felt in one narrow hand.

Wynn thought she saw lighter scars in the skin of the woman's back, as if she had been clawed by an animal long ago.

As the majay-hi wormed around Wynn and into the clearing, Chap hesitantly stepped across the green.

The woman paused and turned just a little. White-blond hair slipped from her shoulder and swung down her back almost to the cushion. She set down the felt and pulled up her wrap. Chap barked loudly and ran forward, and the woman whirled to her feet, even taller than Wynn had first guessed.

Wynn had seen elven women both here and on her continent, but none like this one.

Her face was triangular like all elves', though its long angles swept in soft curves down to a narrow jaw and chin. Her skin was flawless but for the scars Wynn had seen. White-blond eyebrows swept out and up above her temples like downy feathers upon her brow. A long delicate nose ended above a small mouth a shade darker than her skin.

Her almond-shaped eyes were large, even for her own kind.

She did not seem quite real.

"Chap?" the woman said.