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him, and to his purpose here.
    â€˜Nan?’ he whispered.
    â€˜I see her too. Her mind! It is so difficult to enter, so different to read. It’s as if she were erecting barriers to every effort of my probing. All I’m getting is … is pictures. Extraordinary pictures.’
    â€˜Maybe she was following us through the streets.’
    â€˜Yes – I think so.’
    The girl pressed a single page of her notebook against the glass. Mark thought it was whatever she had been sketching. He was gazing at the drawing of an entrance to what might be a church.
    â€˜She knows what we’re looking for.’
    â€˜But how?’
    â€˜I don’t know. But she might be able to help us.’
    Mark had forgotten his chair was screwed to the floor. In his hurry, he almost tripped over his own feet. He stumbled out of the warm café, with its comforting food smells, and into the refuse-strewn coldness of the street. But the feral girl had melted away into the smog.

The Dragon Graveyard
    Kate Shaunessy’s teeth were chattering with cold as the dragon Driftwood descended from the obscuring banks of pure white cloud onto a vista that took her breath away. This couldn’t possibly be their island: huge rocky buttresses rose sheer out of forested slopes and needle-like pillars soared into the air. Yet even these, as they descended and neared them, were capped by small plains dotted with mature pine trees. It was in a wheeling arc, directly towards one of the tallest of these pinnacles, that the dragon’s descent took them. Major changes were in the air. But then, how could she have possibly imagined that there would be no changes when Driftwood himself had changed so very much?
    Somehow, and she hadn’t understood it then any more than she did now, the power bestowed on her by Granny Dew – the Second Power of the Holy Trídédana – had resurrected him from a petrified death. He had perished longago at the end of a terrible war fought between the dragons and titans, led by Fangorath, a being that was half divine. Driftwood – or Omdorrréilliuc, as the Gargs had called him – had been the King of the Dragons and himself half divine. To save the world from imminent destruction, the dragons had sacrificed themselves to Mórígán, the goddess of death. Mórígán had defied Fate to accept the sacrifice, thus bringing an end to the Age of Dragons. But this had ultimately led to her arrival here on Tír, along with her three friends: Alan Duval, the young man she loved, and the adoptive brother and sister, Mark and Mo Grimstone.
    And now she was returning to the same land where she had been tormented and hunted by the Great Witch, Olc, to see if she could save the Momu and thus restore the hope of fertility and rebirth to the people known as the Cill.
    They were alighting on a broad, flat ledge of stone hundreds of feet above a valley verdant with trees. The dragon had become so enormous that their landing involved Kate first climbing down from her comfortable nest in the brilliant green and yellow feathers of his ruff, then making her way through the valley of his wings and down the stairway of his spine, to the very tip of the hundred yards of tail. She walked around the scaly body until she could sit, cross-legged, by the grounded head, to one side of a huge nostril and beneath a reptilian orange eye as large as a tractor tyre. The membrane of the eye performed one of the dragon’s sideways blinks.
    His voice was so deep it rumbled like thunder throughthe ground beneath her. Kate knew that she could not possibly interpret his communication through the minuscule ossicles of her human ears. She was hearing his words and translating them from the language of beginnings, through the oraculum in her brow, which was one with her mind and her being – what the people here called her soul-spirit.
    â€˜I wanted you to see our island once again.’
    â€˜Oh,