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to leap toward her, only to realize he was not a winged thing at all but a creature of hooves and strong legs and long strides. As he bolted out over the green meadows there seemed little difference between what he did now and what he would have done with wings. It was a wonderful freedom—it felt right .
    “Where is this place?” he called.
    “It is not a matter of ‘where’ but of something different . . . ‘how,’ perhaps ...”
    He found he did not care. It was enough simply to run, to feel the wind making his mane and tail snap, to thrill to the thunder of his own hooves as they tore the grass beneath his feet into flying clods.
    She skimmed past him and for a moment was content to fly just a little way ahead, matching his pace so that she seemed to float, rowing herself through the air with her vast pinions, black-beaked head on a neck long as a spear. “Are you weary, child?” she called. “Would you like to stop?”
    “Never!” He laughed. “I could do this forever.” And it seemed like he had never said anything more true—that there would be no greater heaven than to run here forever, fit and strong and free of everything.
    But what is this place? His stride faltered a little. Where am I? I was . . . I’m not . . . He felt his powerful body carrying him across the face of the world on four striding legs. But I’m not a horse . . . I’m a man . . . !
    Heaven. Is this heaven? Does that mean I’m dead?
    And suddenly he shuddered to a stop, the hills suddenly high and close, the sky darker, everything near and threatening. “Where am I?” he said again. “What have you done to me?”
    The swan banked and circled. “Done to you? Those are hard words, Barrick Eddon. I brought you back when I could have let you go. I brought you back.”
    “From where?”
    “From what is next.”
    “I was . . . dying?” A chill stabbed him deep in his center. Even through this fevered excitement, he could suddenly feel how close he had come.
    “Do not fear it. It is a road all of us must tread one day . . . all of us except the gods, that is.”
    “What do you mean?” He was trying to look down at his curious body but his head and neck were not well-shaped to do so. It felt unfamiliar—but also strangely familiar. “You mean everybody dies? But you don’t. You and the king and all your ancestors . . . you don’t.”
    “We will see. If the Fireflower leads you to share our fate, you will be able to judge for yourself what kind of immortality our gift gives to us.”
    The great bowl of meadow surrounded by hills seemed to grow darker still, as if a storm rushed in overhead, but in truth the mixed skies had not changed. “And this place? If I’m not dead, this isn’t Heaven.”
    The swan stretched her beautiful neck. “It is not—although names are at best troublesome in these lands. It is another place. One that I could not be certain you would cross, or even reach, as you began to slip away from the places of the living—there is much I do not know about your people. But it was the only place I could have found you before it was too late, and the only place where I could be strong enough to hold you until you could make your own choice to return to the world or not.”
    Suddenly, as if a door had been thrown open, letting light in, he remembered. “It was the voices—all the . . . the things I knew. The Fireflower. And it felt like I was knowing more every moment . . . !” He felt his four feet restless beneath him suddenly, his entire body tensed to run.
    “Of course,” she said, and for the first time since he had first heard it he found her voice soothing. “Of course. It is difficult enough for one of our kind—how much stranger and more painful for one of your folk. That is why we are seeking help for you.” A flicker of spread wing, a sunbeam of white blazing before his eyes, and she was off again. “So follow! We will go where mortals do not venture, except for those rare few that can