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will not have them. One of the little ones is most pitifully scarred. Around them, in the dark half of the sky, the Imogen can discern a salting of stars.
    It is their light that has awakened her.
    On the bank of the pool she settles, pausing to trace with her fingertips the hoofprints that were not made by any deer.
    The Imogen rises, and follows the stream on down. It tumbles from pool to pool, the lower ones more still and limpid. She crouches beside one, where the light of the sky filters between black-green pine boughs to fall over her shoulder. It is not still water, but it smooths beneath her shadow, making a dark, silvered surface.
    In that shadow she sees the thing from which she takes her name, or what passes for her name, if a name she must have.
    The form in the mirror. Imogen.
    Dark as sorrow, skin like black velvet. When has she seen velvet? How does she know the sleekness of its touch?
    Skin like black velvet: dull, soft, plush across the naked body, which is muscular and long, small-breasted, taut-tendoned. Black wings, lusterless in the twilight, soft as an owl’s. Eyes lucent, amber held up to the sun, the pupils changing shape as she peers into the inexplicable silent water. What are all these things in my mind?
    She has never seen herself before. Have I? Has she? She must, because this is familiar. Familiar even as it changes, her face reshaping under her own probing touch.
    I am like nothing in all the world . I am a trickster’s daughter.
    It sounds right. A trickster’s daughter. But then, what is that? What is trickster ? What is daughter ? What is brother and shadow and mirror, for that matter?
    She knows the answers without knowing how she knows them. She thinks she has forgotten much, in her long slumber, but the knowledge comes with no sensation of loss. It is enough that she also knows—as she knows everything, with interior conviction—what she must do, where she must go.
    It has always been so, the wisdom bred in her, the wyrd written on her bones. She is the Imogen, and she has always done as she was made to do: fed her hunger on a master or at her master’s command, and gone hungry between. Hungry always, as is her nature, and always unsatisfied.
    She must go. She feels the pull, the command, the echo inside her. Her brother—her master—has spoken, and bid her find a new master and cast herself in his service.
    The Imogen does not wish to do as she is bid.
    Almost without warning, the wings unfurl, the tendons stretch, and she is skybound—for the first time? Once again? Moonshadows fall about her like tattered rags, and the waterfall begins to splash again.
    She rises.

38 A.R.
Spring Solstice
    Footsore in mendicant’s sandals, Aethelred leaned on his staff. It was his second since he’d set out from the cottage some nine months before, and now he used it as a prop to rest each foot by turn, like a mule cocking one leg up to sleep standing.
    He’d gotten to meet a few mules since Rekindling, though the Dweller Within knew where they came from. Well, now that he thought of it, the Dweller probably did know, at that. As she no doubt knew everything. More or less. The trick was getting her to do something more informative than casting up mysterious babies.
    Aethelred liked mules, with their long floppy ears and solid common sense that brooked no tomfoolery. He wondered, somewhat idly, if there were any mule moreaux.
    He raised his hand and scratched around the rim of the chromed side of his face. The bright spring sun felt like a pressing iron applied to his face, and the old burns still itched. He could feel the heat in them, soaked deep into living tissue where it would never come out. It warmed his fingertips where he pressed them to ridged scars.
    Aethelred shook his head, rolling heavy shoulders eased by the warmth of that same sunlight that scorched his face. He’d walked a long way to find this place. There was no point in hesitating now. The dirt track under his feet led