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prude of a courtier, too. But she couldn't move because her mind was racing instead.
    Elsie Delgora really was building an ark.
    No Witch-Born had been blessed by Magic, the man-god, in eight years. If he didn't bestow the Talent on anyone else, the Witches would die off one by one until there was no one left to keep the Warding Pillars in place.
    And if the Warding Pillars came down, then the Wild would come in.
    Valeda turned from the window. Staggering to the bed, she sat down and tried to catch her breath. She'd broken out into a fine sweat. Nursery rhymes drifted through her memory, old warnings given about what lay beyond the Pillars, traditions rooted so deep that no one could specify where they had come from.
    It has been and ever shall be
    The plight of the Witches to live for thee
    The Pillars stand tall
    For one and for all
    And the Wild has no place to flee.
    Beyond the vale
    Where the Wild prevails
    Lies death for you and for me
    Her mind conjured childhood horrors; beasts twice as tall as a man, with teeth flashing deadly sharp in a snarl, claws raking through the air with great whooshing sounds. Unnamed animosity was focused on every Untalented in Magnellum, insatiable and unstoppable, held in check only by the Warding Pillars.
    Valeda closed her eyes and tried to will the images away, but it only made them clearer. Thick, long vines rampaging through towns, swiping away buildings and homes and people like so much rubbish from a table. Feline and wolf-like beasts, she could make them out now, sleekly muscular but still snarling, hunting down every breathing member of their society.
    With a strangled, distressed cry, Valeda opened her eyes and stood up. She was right. She knew she was right. Wherever he had gone, Magic, the man-god, was no longer in Magnellum and all of their lives were at risk.
    People had to be warned.
    ***
    Winslow knew when the woman woke up. He'd managed to repair the head injury, but no amount of magic could predict what lasting repercussions would come of it. He'd once seen his friend Bartholomew heal a man's hip, but the deterioration of the subject's bones had kept him limping.
    Head trauma like the mother's could result in a lasting problem. She could wake and not remember who she was. She could forget how to eat or walk, or have any number of problems. For most of the day Winslow had feared she'd never wake at all. So he'd kept his Talent focused on her breathing while he and Mirabella had seen to the necessities of food and better lodging. Sleeping under the wreckage was unappealing on several fronts. For one, he was constantly afraid the thing would fall. For another, there was something morbid about the thought of Cosata Divenhurst-Lorlain's body being so close.
    The thought of Cosata brought more issues to mind. He couldn't figure out how Mirabella and her mother had managed to survive the wreck at all. He knew the only reason he'd made it was because of his Talent, and even then it had been a close call. Mirabella's mother might have been in terrible shape and probably would have died without his help, but compared to everyone else on that train she was lucky.
    Every instinct in him had screamed that something else was going on, he just couldn't figure out what. And he wanted to find out what it was before the rescue came. He estimated that the depot in Three Points would have figured out that they were missing by now and would have started to mount a search party. That gave him a day at best, maybe more, depending on whether they risked taking a train out to find them.
    The late autumn air had the bite of encroaching winter to it, so he'd known they would need some sort of cover. He'd taken the walls and roof from the train car two sections down from theirs to make a small shanty. They'd positioned it a little ways from the wreck, under a cluster of trees for added cover. Mercifully, their train had been scarcely populated, so the casualties weren't quite so high. Not a lot of