Grabbing Jennifer’s hand, Paul wheeled and began to move quickly back through the exhibition. He looked over his shoulder: Galadan was following, a sardonic smile on his face. He wasn’t hurrying.

They rounded a corner. Mumbling a swift prayer, Paul pushed on the bar of a door marked emergency exit only. He heard a guard shout behind him, but no alarm sounded. They found themselves in a service corridor. Without saying a word, they clattered down the hallway. Behind them Paul heard the guard shout again as the door opened a second time.

The corridor forked. Paul pushed open another door and hurried Jennifer through. She stumbled and he had to hold her up.

“I can’t run, Paul!”

He cursed inwardly. They were as far from the exit as they could be. The door had taken them out into the largest room in the gallery, Henry Moore’s permanent sculpture exhibit. It was the pride of the Art Gallery of Ontario, the room that placed it on the artistic map of the world.

And it was the room in which, it seemed, they were going to die.

He helped Jennifer move farther away from the door. They passed several huge pieces, a madonna and child, a nude, an abstract shape.

“Wait here,” he said, and sat her down on the broad base of one of the sculptures. There was no one else in the room—not on a weekday morning in November.

It figures, he thought. And turned. The Wolflord walked through the same door they had used. For the second time he and Galadan faced each other in a place where time seemed to hang suspended.

Jennifer whispered his name. Without taking his eyes from Galadan he heard her say, in a voice shockingly cold, “It is too soon, Paul. Whatever you are, you must find it now. If not, I will curse you as I die.”

And still reeling from that, he saw Galadan raise a long slender finger to a red weal on his temple. “This one,” said the Lord of the andain, “I lay at the root of your Tree.”

“You are lucky,” Paul said, “to be alive to lay it anywhere.”

“Perhaps,” the other said, and smiled again, “but no more fortunate than you have been until now. Both of you.” There was, though Paul had not seen it come, a knife in his hand. He remembered that knife. Galadan moved a few steps closer. No one, Paul knew, was going to enter the room.

And then he knew something more. There was a deep stirring, as of the sea, within him, and he moved forward himself, away from J ennifer, and said, “Would you battle the Twiceborn of Mórnir?”

And the Wolflord replied, “For nothing else am I here, though I will kill the girl when you are dead. Remember who I am: the children of gods have knelt to wash my feet. You are nothing yet, Pwyll Twiceborn, and will be twice dead before I let you come into your force.”

Paul shook his head. There was a tide running in his blood. He heard himself say, as if from far off, “Your father bowed to me, Galadan. Will you not do so, son of Cernan?” And he felt a rush of power to see the other hesitate.

But only for a moment. Then the Wolflord, who had been a force of might and a Lord of the mighty for past a thousand years, laughed aloud and, raising his hand again, plunged the room into utter darkness.

“What son have you ever known to follow his father’s path?” he said. “There is no dog to guard you now, and I can see in the dark!”

The surging of power stopped within Paul.

In its place came something else, a quiet, a space as of a pool within a wood, and he knew this, instinctively, to be the true access to what he now was and would be. From within this calm he moved back to Jennifer and said to her, “Be easy, but hold fast to me.” As he felt her grip his hand and rise to stand beside him, he spoke once more to the Wolflord, and his voice had changed.

“Slave of Maugrim,” he said, “I cannot defeat you yet, nor can I see you in the dark. We will meet again, and the third time pays for all, as well you know. But I will not tarry for you in this place.”

And on the words he felt himself dropping into the still, deep place, the pool within, which uttermost need had found. Down and down he went, and, holding tight to Jennifer, he took them both away through the remembered cold, the interstices of time, the space between the Weaver’s worlds, back to Fionavar.

Vae heard the knocking at the door. Since Shahar had been sent north she often heard sounds in the house at night, and she had taught herself to ignore them, mostly.

But the hammering on the shop entrance below was not to be ignored as being born of winter solitude or wartime fears. It was real, and urgent, and she didn’t want to know who it was.

Her son was in the hallway outside her room, though; he had already pulled on trousers and the warm vest she had made him when the snows began. He looked sleepy and young, but he always looked young to her.

“Shall I go see?” he said bravely.

“Wait,” Vae said. She rose, herself, and pulled on a woolen robe over her night attire. It was cold in the house, and long past the middle of the night. Her man was away, and she was alone in the chill of winter with a fourteen-year-old child and a rapping, more and more insistent, at her door.

Vae lit a candle and followed Finn down the stairs.

“Wait,” slie said again in the shop, and lit two more candles, despite the waste. One did not open the door on a winter night without some light by which to see who came. When the candles had caught, she saw that Finn had taken the iron rod from the upstairs fire. She nodded, and he opened the door.

In the drifted snow outside stood two strangers, a man, and a tall woman he supported with an arm about her shoulders. Finn lowered his weapon; they were unarmed. Coming nearer, and holding her candle high, Vae saw two things: that the woman wasn’t a stranger after all, and that she was far gone with child.

“From the ta’kiena?” said Vae. “The third time.”

The woman nodded. Her eyes turned to Finn and then back to his mother. “He is still here,” she said. “I am glad.”

Finn said nothing; he was so young it could break Vae’s heart. The man in the doorway stirred. “We need help,” he said. “We are fleeing the Wolflord from our world. I am Pwyll, this is Jennifer. We crossed here last spring with Loren.”

Vae nodded, wishing Shahar were there instead of in the windy cold of North Keep with his grandfather’s spear. He was a craftsman, not a soldier; what did her husband know of war?

“Come in,” she said, and stepped back. Finn closed and bolted the door behind them. “I am Vae. My man is away. What help can I offer you?”

“The crossing brought me early to my time,” the woman called Jennifer said, and Vae saw from her face that it was true.

“Make a fire,” she said to Finn. “In my room upstairs.” She turned to the man. “You help him. Boil water on the fire. Finn will show you where the clean linen is. Quickly, both of you.”

They left, taking the stairs two at a time.

Alone in the candlelit shop, among the unspun wool and the finished craftings, she and the other woman gazed at each other.

“Why me?” said Vae.

The other’s eyes were clouded with pain. “Because,” she said, “I need a mother who knows how to love her child.”

Vae had been fast asleep only moments before; the woman in the room with her was so fair she might have been a creature from the dreamworld, save for her eyes.

“I don’t understand,” said Vae.

“I will have to leave him,” the woman said. “Could you give your heart to another son when Finn takes the Longest Road?”

In daylight she might have struck or cursed anyone who said so flatly the thing that twisted through her like a blade. But this was night and half a dream, and the other woman was crying.

Vae was a simple woman, a worker in wool and cloth with her man. She had a son who for no reason she could understand had been called three times to the Road when the children played the prophecy game, the ta’kiena, and then a fourth time before the Mountain went up to signal war. And now there was this.