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Colonnae who could not, or certainly should not, laugh.
    “And your ranger friend has kept me busy, lo, these last weeks,” the surprising specter went on. “I dare say!”
    “Then why have you come?” an unnerved Briellebluntly pressed, too fearful and too intrigued to allow this most unusual conversation to be sidetracked.
    Death did not answer, and in the course of that uncomfortable pause, the wise witch solved the riddle. “Ye’re angered at Thalasi,” she reasoned. “He took something from ye.”
    “And still he takes,” Death confirmed.
    Brielle breathed a lot easier then, as she came to understand the truth. Thalasi had torn Mitchell from the grasp of Death, and that, above all else, the somber Colonnae specter could not tolerate. “Then ye hate the black thing as much as do we all,” the witch said quietly. “And can ye destroy it?”
    “Thomas Morgan, Martin Reinheiser, the two who have become one, has defeated even me,” the specter explained.
    Brielle was caught off guard, both by the revelation that Death, who, by the very definition of his name, could never be beaten, apparently had been, and also by the use of Morgan Thalasi’s birth name, Thomas Morgan, a name the witch had not heard in many, many years. Also, the reference to both Thomas Morgan and Martin Reinheiser, used in the singular, was indeed telling. The two had become one, as Brielle had suspected and as Death had just confirmed. Yet another perversion, Brielle reasoned. Another insult against the natural order to add to Thalasi’s growing list.
    “Thalasi is not so strong now,” Brielle explained, hoping that Death would whisk off right then and there and destroy the wretched Thalasi, and Mitchell, in one fell swoop. “He’s bent the fabric—”
    “Our score was settled,” the specter interrupted before she could gain any real momentum.
    “Then what do ye want?” Brielle asked impatiently—and nervously, once again.
    “What is rightfully mine,” Death matter-of-factly replied.
    “Hollis Mitchell.”
    “May he rest in peace.”
    “Then show me how to deliver him to ye!” the witch growled. “Ye cannot take him back yerself, it’d seem, or ye’d have done so and been done with it, so show me how I might deliver him to ye!”
    “That is what you asked at the pool,” Death said calmly. “And that is why I have come.” And with that, the specter lifted one bony arm, its skeletal finger pointing past the witch to the broken tree stump.
    Brielle followed the line and moved to the side of the pool, and in its dark waters, as the image of the many stars now overhead faded away, she saw clearly a vision of a sword.
    And such a sword! Shining metal edged in diamonds, and glowing of its own inner light. She stared at it for a long, long while, saw into it and through it, glanced at its vast surroundings only for a few moments—enough time to see a treasure hoard beyond anything she had ever imagined; enough time to see the scaly guardian, its wings folded about it as it slept comfortably.
    Hardly drawing breath, the witch turned about, but Death, Arawn, was gone. She looked back to the pool, to see only the reflection of stars.
    “Brielle!” came a desperate cry, the voice of Belexus, huffing and puffing as he ran and stumbled through the trees. He burst into the clearing, brandishing his sword—a sword that had always seemed so magnificent to the witch, though she cared little for instruments of war, but that now, considering the vision she had just witnessed in the pool, seemed rather ordinary indeed.

Chapter 4

An Evil He Couldn’t Know
    T HE YOUNG WITCH stared long and hard at the reflecting pool, which she had created just as her mother had taught her, but the image would not come to her. She knew that there were talons in the area—the birds had whispered as much—but for some reason she couldn’t understand, Rhiannon’s magical eye was blind to them.
    Behind her, Bryan paced anxiously, fingering the hilt