“Great. You’re prepared and you won’t be fooled. Me, too, believe it or not—even if I don’t worry about it as much as you.” Quentin looked off into the darkness, where a shooting star streaked across the firmament and disappeared. “But you can’t prepare against everything, Bek, and you can’t save yourself from being fooled now and then. The fact is, no matter what you do, no matter how hard you try, sometimes your efforts fall short.”
Bek looked at him and said nothing. True enough, he was thinking, but he didn’t care for the implications.
He slept undisturbed by rain and cold that night, the skies clear and the air warm, and he did not dream or toss. Even so, he woke in the deep sleep hours of early morning, bathed in starlight and infused by a feeling of uneasiness. The fire had burned itself out and lay cold and gray. Beside him, Quentin was snoring, wrapped in his blankets. Bek did not know how long he had been asleep, but the moon was down and the forest about him was silent and black.
He rose without thinking, looking around cautiously as he did so, trying to pinpoint the source of his discomfort. There seemed to be no reason for it. He pulled on his great cloak, wrapping himself tightly against a sudden chill, and walked down to the banks of the Silver River. The river was swollen with spring rains and snowmelt off the Runne Mountains, but its progress this night was sluggish and steady and its surface clear of debris. As he stood there, a night bird swooped down and glided into the trees, a silent, purposeful shadow. He started at the unexpected movement, then quieted once more. Carefully, he studied the glittering surface of the waters, searching for what troubled him, then shifted his attention to the far bank and the shadowed trees. Still nothing. He took a deep breath and exhaled. Perhaps he had been mistaken.
He was turning back toward Quentin when he saw the light. It was just a glimmer of brightness at first, as if a spark had been struck somewhere back in the trees across the river. He stared at it in surprise as it appeared, faded, reappeared, faded anew, then steadied and came on. It bobbed slightly with its approach to the river, then glided out of the trees, suspended on air and floating free as it crossed the water and came to a halt just yards away from him.
It flashed sharply in his eyes, and he blinked in response. When his vision cleared, a young girl stood before him, the light balanced in her hand. She was somehow familiar to him, although he could not say why. She was beautiful, with long dark hair and startling blue eyes, and there was an innocence to her face that made his heart ache. The light she held emanated from one end of a polished metal cylinder and cast a long, narrow beam on the ground between them.
“Well met, Bek Rowe,” she said softly. “Do you know me?”
He stared, unable to answer. She had appeared out of nowhere, perhaps come from across the river on the air itself, and he believed her to be a creature of magic.
“You have chosen to undertake a long and difficult journey, Bek,” she whispered in her childlike voice. “You go to a place where few others have gone and from which only one has returned. But the greater journey will not carry you over land and sea, but inside your heart. The unknown you fear and the secrets you suspect will reveal themselves. All will be as it must. Accept this, for that is the nature of things.”
“Who are you?” he whispered.
“This and that. What you see before you and many things you do not. I am a chameleon of time and age, my true form so old I have forgotten it. For you, I am two things. The child you see and think you might perhaps know, and this.”
Abruptly, the child before him transformed into something so hideous he would have screamed if his voice had not frozen in his throat. The thing was huge and twisted and ugly, all wrapped in scarred and ravaged skin, hair burnt to a black stubble about its head and face, eyes maddened and red, mouth twisted in a leer that suggested horrors too terrible to contemplate. It loomed over him, tall even when bent, its clawed and crooked hands gesturing hypnotically.