Grace couldn't help looking towards the window, seeing the darkness that had grown up there for what it was. It was a storm, called up by possibility, the edges of each cloud crackling with power, and the centre of the towering cloud she could see an absolute black.

Grace heard the elderly woman raise her voice in anger.

"Nobody is going anywhere," she said, addressing Afi. "This girl is a danger, and as such-"

"I'm sorry, Dedora," Afi told her, and Grace looked back at him, a little surprised at the iron in his voice, "but that doesn't matter any longer. The danger is out there - and soon, it will be in the palace. We have to leave."

He looked over at Grace, and for a strange moment an understanding seemed to sing between them as she saw for the first time that he was afraid. And then he smiled, and she knew that she had to smile back, and pretend that she was eager to face whatever was out there.

"I'd like to see you try," the elderly Dedora said, and even in her fear, Grace didn't miss the warning look that she gave Merrily. The blonde, dimpled Merrily was flicking her eyes back and forth between Afi and her colleague in indecision.

Afi just slid a key from his sleeve and put it into the lock.

"Let's go, Grace."

Grace's arms and legs felt detached from the rest of her, and when she stood, she did it clumsily. She made to put the book in her pocket, and realised that she was still wearing the loose trousers and top.

"Now you wait just a minute," the old woman said. But nobody listened to her.

Grace looked around for something to carry the package in, but none of the colours in what she looked at seemed quite right and she couldn't tell what anything was. Flickering visions of flesh wolves and evanescents kept coming between her and the room.

"Here," the brown-haired girl said, picking up a little embroidered gold sewing-bag and emptying out the contents onto her bed. She pressed it into Grace's hand. "Put it in here."

Grace looked at her, and then out at the sky again, and realised that everything she had planned had been turned on its head. She couldn't use the girls to break the bond now when the Queen's magic might be the only thing that could stop the invasion of the Cold.

But that didn't mean they couldn't help.

"What's your name?" she asked the girl.

"Aniela," the girl told her, and Grace could see that she was waiting to be told to do something.

She's so young, she thought. Shouldn't she be staying here, where there's some safety?

But Grace thought about the years these girls had spent in safety, feeling their powers dwindle day by day, and she realised that it wasn't so very different from how she had felt sometimes at home. She had known what she might face when she had come here, and these girls would know just as well what was out there.

"Where did you grow up? Here?"

Aniela shook her head. "I'm an outlander."

Grace nodded. "So you know how to fight the cold? You know about them?"

"Grace?" Afi called.

"We're bringing them too," she told him, shoving her two cloth packages into Aniela's sewing kit. "All of them."

She expected to have to argue, but every one of them started to move when she did, Aniela the first.

Afi nodded and swung the door open wide, but the Dedora almost ran over to push past him and stand in the way. She stopped there, an absurd figure which, overweight as it was, still couldn't block the whole doorway. She extended her arms and turned to face them all, shaking, her eyes wide and overly bright.

"You aren't going!" she called. "Get back to your couches or I promise I'll thrash the lot of you!"

Grace glanced at the girls behind her, and saw no hesitation. There was something else in their expressions, a fury and a hunger to act. Threats didn't seem to mean anything to them now, not even to Kelly and Lily who had been here only a few days. They could sense freedom.

Dedora saw that they were not stopping, and called to Merrily where she stood close by and still indecisive. "Merrily! Come and stand with me. They won't get past both of us easily."

Grace found herself right in front of the old woman, close enough to hear the raggedness of her breathing, and to see the redness of her cheeks and the weathered, wrinkled skin which was marked by age. Grace stopped, not because she was unable to push her out of the way, but because she recognised fear when she saw it, and she could understand why one of the most terrifying things might be change.

And then, as she looked at her, she saw that some of the marks on Dedora's forehead that she had taken to be age spots were too regular. There were two faint horizontal lines, and in the centre, slightly red and shiny against her pale skin, was a circular scar.

Grace held up her fingers towards it, and the woman flinched.

"Don't you hate them for what they did to you?" she asked.

"They saved me from myself," Dedora said, and the shaking grew worse. Grace wanted to kick her all over again, partly because she was fighting a battle with herself, too. Dedora was trying to force her to do what a large part of her wanted to for itself. It was only the new Grace that wanted to leave that room and face the horrors that might be waiting.

"You don't believe that," Afi said quietly to Dedora.

There was a quiet rustle of rich fabric and Aniela stepped up beside her, her dark eyes fixed on her jailor with an earnest insistence that Dedora seemed to shrink under.

"We aren't leaving here to harm," the girl said. "We're leaving to save. The people of this city need our help, Dedora. And yours, too."

The old woman shocked Grace by starting to cry. It was an ugly, open-mouthed, heaving sobbing that bent her over, and Merrily hurried to prop her up. Her evident confusion matched Grace's. Dedora didn't seem to be the sort of woman who let herself cry.

Aniela gave Grace a strange little smile, and then she turned to the other girls.

"I think we can take these off now," she said, and unleashed a rush of movement. The girls tore them off, and their loathing towards the circlets was evident as they hurled them onto the ground or at the wall.

"Will you bring them back, afterwards?" Merrily asked, in a small voice, as she patted the sobbing Dedora on the back. Grace looked at her frightened face and didn't hate her quite so much as she had.

"We won't need to," Grace told her, with a certainty she didn't quite feel in her heart.

"I shouldn't let you go," Merrily tried again.

But then Afi winked at her, and said, with a crooked smile, "No, you shouldn't. But I know you're going to do the right thing. I knew it the moment I walked in here."

Grace wondered if the blush rising in Merrily's cheeks was blood stolen from her. She could feel her own face drain of colour and it rose in Merrily at once, warming her and bringing back with it the pretty, dimpling smile.

She nodded, and Afi nodded at Grace, without any smile, and led them out into the hall. Grace followed at the rear, trying not to think about the smile for Merrily and the nod for her.

He told you himself, he never met anyone out in the wilds, she said to herself. Of course he's going to find someone else now he has a choice.

The thought was heavy in her chest. But as she crossed the threshold of the room and its fane stones, she felt a great rush of delight thrill through her. It was like finding her family again, to sense possibility all around her, and it almost banished the feeling of self-pity.

And then she heard Dedora say behind her, through a throat thick with crying, "I'm coming too."

Grace stopped in her tracks, and turned to stare at her. Dedora pushed Merrily's supporting arm away, and with a deep breath followed them through the door.

And then Grace understood, as Dedora lifted her shaking right hand and coaxed a blue flame into life there. She closed her palm on it a moment later, as if she were ashamed, but Grace could see the joy it gave her as well. She wondered how long Dedora had been without possibility.

So fane stones don't always drain it all away, she thought to herself. Or perhaps it comes back.

But there was no time to worry about the fane stones any more. She nodded to Dedora, and then walked quickly to catch the others up, hearing Dedora's heavy tread behind her. Though she would remember Merrily's look of horror as she watched her fellow guardian for a long time to come.

The corridors were as empty here as they always seemed to be. The echoing, spacious elegance seemed to have turned threatening the moment the howling cold had come. Though Grace realised within a few moments that the cries and howls had grown silent, to be replaced by a rumbling and booming somewhere deep below them.

What if they bring this place down? she thought. With the Queen's magic directed towards whatever was attacking them, it might not take much.

Afi suddenly slowed, ahead of her, and then stopped, his hand to his ear once more. Grace came up to him and saw, now that she was closer, that there was a tiny jewel in it, and realised that it must be a means of communication with the Captain.

He looked at her, thoughtfully. "Roschan's under heavy attack, a great deal of it magical. We need magical defences, and urgently, but the Queen claims she can't spare more than a fraction of her power."

"We can send the girls down to him," Grace said.

He looked at them, doubtfully. "Do you think they can help?"

"Of course we can," Aniela answered him, her voice steely. "I defended my home for years before Ruidic found me, and even the inexperienced ones can do something. Dedora and Moril and I can help them."

The tallest of the women, a round-faced blonde with short hair, nodded. "I can teach them some defences quickly."

"You won't have to," Grace told her. "We're going to link you."

Dedora made a scoffing noise, apparently returned to her old self a little already. "Do you really know that little of possibility?"

"I think I understand it better than you do, if you're going to tell me something can't be done," Grace told her, trying hard not to sound like a petulant teenager, and thinking she'd probably failed. "Anything's possible, here. To link a woman with a woman, you just need them to do it willingly. It isn't a forced control by one riezehn over another; it's a partnership of equals giving their power willingly to one who can direct it well."

Dedora blinked at her, but Aniela seemed ready to accept what she said. "Do you wish us to give the power to you, Dedora? Or will you give it to me?"

Dedora gave her a look somewhere between indignation and fear, and then nodded. "I would give it to you willingly, but I believe experience might count for more. I fought the cold for three decades before I came here. And I burn to fight them again."

Grace smiled, and tried to squash down the thought, I just hope I'm right about this...

"Go to Roschan, then, and help him. Where is he, Afi?"

"Pushed back against the great doors," he said. "I think they'll have been forced to retreat into the entrance hall by the time you arrive."

Dedora nodded. "We can push them back."

And she took charge again, quickly and certainly. Grace watched in silent surprise as the other girls accepted it, and went with her down the corridor towards the disc of the travelling wind.

"Roschan," Afi said, his fingers to his ear. "We're sending you help. You'll have to keep an open mind about it."

And then he turned back to Grace, his face a little bitter. "We can't break the link now, can we? Not without ending the fight against the cold."

Grace shook her head. "But we can go to the Queen. There's something very wrong about her child, and I don't think she understands. If we can separate them somehow, I think she'll listen to reason."

Afi nodded, slowly and doubtfully. "And if she doesn't?"

Grace shrugged one shoulder. "Then we overcome her, and I try to take over the link with the boys."

Afi blew out a long breath of air, and then nodded.

"All right, if only because I can't see any other way."

He turned and began to walk after the girls. Grace followed, her eyes on her slippers, and felt almost as bad as she had when he had flirted with Merrily.

He doesn't think I can do it, she thought, wretchedly.

"We should be able to use the intention winds," Afi told her, as he strode forwards. "We're going to help her, and we just need to hold onto that thought."

Grace paced after him, trying to find the anger that had brought her through so much.

He has no right to doubt me, she thought, hollowly. I've done things nobody has ever done before. Doesn't he realise that?

But the thought was a quiet protest instead of a cry of outrage. Grace knew that she had doubts every bit as strong as his were.

And then, as they turned a corner, a hissing roar echoed down the corridor, and the lights dimmed and went out.

"Wonderful," she heard Afi say, with a sigh, and something about his long-suffering voice calmed the frantic racing of her heart. It was absolutely black, and she spent a few seconds internally cursing whoever had designed this place to have so few windows.

"What's happened?" she whispered.

"At a guess, a secondary group has got into the castle while the guard has been distracted," he murmured.

"What sort of group?"

"I don't know," he said, and she felt his hand close around her wrist. He tugged her gently forwards, and she staggered slightly as she started to follow him. She had no idea how he was able to see through the profound dark, while she felt as though she was about to knock into something. "But I'd say there are riezehn, considering that the lights have gone out."

They walked through the darkness for what could have been only a minute, but felt endless. The hissing roar came again, sounding closer this time, and Afi paused. She felt her pulse pounding against his fingers, and was ashamed of her fear.

"Do you have a weapon?" he asked.

"No," Grace said, immediately, and then, "Oh. Yes. The wand."

She drew it out of her waist-band, and rubbed at her leg, briefly, where it had now made a raw patch against her skin. If she hadn't been so scared, she might have noticed it.

"Anything more... physical?" he asked her, in such an ironic voice that she couldn't help smiling.

Grace heaved a sigh. "I thought that was what you were for."

"I'll try to oblige."

She heard a hiss as he drew out a blade, and then another, and she felt a little better still as she remembered him leaping and whirling outside the gate. They may not be an army, but they weren't defenceless.

He drew her onwards, his fingers around her left wrist now that she had the wand held in her right hand. She realised that she could feel the possibility that infused the rowan wood of the wand now, and it almost seemed a living thing that wanted to be used.

There was another hiss, and it was close enough this time that she jumped. There was a dim, sickly green light coming from somewhere in front of them now.

"Just ahead," she heard Afi murmur, and she nodded, before realising that he couldn't see her. She twisted her hand in his grip and squeezed it in acknowledgement, and felt him squeeze fiercely in return, before he let go as he rounded the corner.

She couldn't see well enough to realise that he had stopped just in front of her, and she crashed into him, her nose coming into painful contact with his shoulder-blade. She wanted to ask what he was doing, until she looked for herself, and then her rapidly beating heart jumped a beat.

They were on the wide corridor that led to the room where the boys slept. She had seen it enough times to recognise it even in the dim light. And she recognised the source of the light. It was Ruidic, standing in front of that door, his eyes burning a deep green as he stood over a figure on the floor. His broad chest was heaving and heaving for air.

It took her a tiny fraction of a moment to see him, and to see the knife that was clasped in one hand; and to see the trail of scarlet that flowed onto the floor. Just afterwards she saw the little figure lying there, one arm thrown out to the side and the other clutched over his stomach.

The cry that left her mouth seemed to carry half of her heart with it.

"Benjamin!"

The corridor and the inhuman figure that she had somehow trusted began to fracture as tears flooded into her eyes, and with a howl of pain she ran towards him with his own wand held out in front of her.