He held out his other hand. On its palm rested a single piece of flint. His gaze was now focused, solid on Blackthorn's own. His father's voice—steady, more certain than the boy had ever heard. "Or I may choose to live it within the light. . . ."

Before the boy Blackthorn could react—before he finally understood why the breeze had wafted an unctuous aroma, why the ground and his father's clothes and hair were damp with that slick sheen—his father struck the flint against the rock.

The sparks leaped, three of them, leaving thin, brilliant, orange fissures in the air, like the tails of comets.

"Fare thee well, my son."

Those comets arched, one simply dropping into the leaves, the other falling upon the scales of justice embroidered on the Lord Mayor's tabbard, the last settling into that single lock of white hair.

"Father!"

The sun dimmed behind another cloud, but the glade . . .

The glade erupted . . .

Erupted with a fiery . . .

* * *

Light.

It poured forth from the hearth of Lord British's chambers, no longer warming or welcoming. Not like before. "Whitelock!" Blackthorn screamed. The great doors behind him shut, sealing him from the rest of Britannia.

He stormed forward into the chamber, sword drawn, searching for the scribe. Not at the desk, though papers covered it in thick, erratic laminas. Not on the bed. Not gloating in that plush, oversize chair. Not in the shadows, either. The shadows. The chamber may have blazed with the hearth's horrible, frigid incandescence, but the shadows—they were everywhere. Curled within the corners, scuttling underneath the bed, crouched beneath the desk.

"Whitelock! I know thou art here!"

Blackthorn scoured over the scrolls on the desk, his brow creasing slightly deeper with each line that he read, all in that familiar handwriting, the same fluid script that had marked the documents within Windemere's throne room. When he came across Whitelock's signature, fury ravished his throat, escaped in a decimating roar. A sweep of his arm sent the documents so high into the air that it seemed as if the ceiling had become shingled in yellow parchment.

He paused when his eyes caught his own within Lord British's mirror. There he stood—chest heaving in and out, rabid breaths wheezing through his ivory rictus of teeth—as if in the eye of a maelstrom of fluttering, falling parchment, a storm made all the more vast and chaotic by the reflections in that damnable mirror. He began to chuckle. He did not like the sound of it, quiet as it was, intense, maniacal, only made worse when he remembered that he had heard this laughter long ago, when his own reflection had grinned at him. It had been during the summer solstice, the day he had been named First Hand to the King, the evening he had stepped out of Lord British's tent and into the chamber of those three shards . . .

Run!