Grace was transfixed. Magpie-like, she was dazzled by the runs and flashes of light along the spire as it began to twist in the yellow-orange light of the sun. And the vast size of it was captivating too. She wondered how tall it was as a section of crystal supporting it gave up and fell away; and how much it weighed.

And then as the slow twist became a rushing fall, she started to scramble along the ground, frantic to be out from underneath it. She put weight on her injured leg and sobbed as it gave way with another lance of pain, but she kept trying to move anyway. A mere two seconds as it plunged towards her, raining more of the molten crystal as it went, spread out into an endless expectation of feeling the pointed spire spear her through the back.

She couldn't make sense of the sensation that came instead. Someone seemed to grasp hold of her, and then she was rushing through the garden at a pace faster than she could ever have travelled herself.

Her backside crashed into the grass and a weight crunched into her. She felt her broken ribs grate against each other, but she wasn't sure if she screamed. The noise around her was too huge and endless.

When the weight lifted, she found herself looking past Ruidic's shoulder at a mountain of shattered crystal. At its centre, upside-down but absurdly almost upright, stood the spire. Grace realised that it must have dug through the earth until it came to a rest, what had once been its base now a jagged mass of broken crystal. Its top reached almost to the height of the remains of the dome.

Snow had already begun to cover it all, whirling down in the icy blast from the cold mage's storm though some of them, picked out in vivid orange by the sun, looked more like sparks than snow.

She realised that Ruidic was staring at the devastation too, and she said urgently, "Ruidic. The spell."

"I know," he told her, and when he gave her a glance out of his moving eyes, she saw that they were still glowing with magic. "I have part of it already."

"Then hide somewhere, and cast it," she said. "You have to go, before he finds us-"

But she saw the way his eyes latched onto something behind her, and narrowed. She knew that when she turned it would be the mage she saw, and he had seen Ruidic, now, too.

She twisted, moving her body as little as she could. She didn't want to feel her ribs grating across each other again.

He steamed as he walked through the snow. His huge form was blackened from the fire, and across his face there was a livid red blister.

If I made him angry before... she thought, and tensed in expectation of another attack. Would it be Ruidic he went for? Or her?

She had told him that Ruidic was the only one who could release the weapon, she realised, her heart thumping painfully in her bruised and fractured chest. But I didn't know it was actually true! she thought, desperately.

But the mage walked warily, and he held power fizzing a gentle green in his hands without making any move to release it. As he came closer, she realised that he was looking at her.

"You have it, don't you?" he said. His voice was soft this time, but full of an intense and distasteful greed.

She shook her head, without knowing what she was denying.

He gave a short laugh. "You can't deny it when the evidence is all around us. You have the power of fire, and it's too great a power to be yours."

She blinked at him, and then understood.

He thinks I have Cartheno's Fire, she thought. And he doesn't know what it is, or he'd just kill me and take it...

He stopped his approach, and stood watching her, with a wariness that seemed bizarre when she was lying on the floor feeling as though she was falling apart.

He thought she had it because she had used fire, and in her inexperience, it had been a fire that was beyond her control. She wondered, briefly, what would have happened if she had chosen to use ice, instead.

Well, the spire would still be standing, for one thing, a little part of her mind said.

Show me what it is. He spoke into her mind again, as he had before. She flinched, hating the sensation, though she realised that it was different this time. It was a gentle, insidious sound. He wasn't trying to bully her – he was trying to persuade.  I can help you to understand its power. What you have done here is nothing compared to what the weapon is capable of.

He's afraid of it, she thought. Which means he's afraid of me, too...

She could see Ruidic moving to step up beside her, but she held a hand out to him.

How would I behave if I had a weapon more powerful than anything else in the world? she thought. And then it came to her that she had already seen someone who thought he had it. I just need to imagine I'm Edin.

She smiled at the mage, and conjured a little fire to dance over her fingers. And while she looked at the flames, she was thinking, furiously, I need to get Ruidic away from him while he casts the spell.

"I don't feel like sharing," she said, and then she looked around at Ruidic, and said, "and that goes for you, too."

She saw the surprise on his face as she pushed her will behind a symbol of sending and shoved him through a flowering shrub and out of sight.

She heard the mage laughing within her mind.

You should never have fought me, he told her. You should have welcomed me. You are just the same, you and I.

 She laughed, while she tried not to shout in her mind that she would never be like him. If he could walk through her mind, she was certain that he could read some of her thoughts. For a moment, she wondered if there was somewhere she could hide her real thoughts.

You can't keep it from me forever, he said, as if he had almost understood her. I will find it in the end. But to do so I will tear through your mind and leave it a shell of itself. You should choose a better way.

Although she knew that he meant to frighten her, she was afraid. She knew that he was capable of doing what he said. Only the shield had saved her last time, and Ruidic was – she hoped – now casting another spell, and Ma and Dedora she could only hope were helping the boys. If they weren't, they were probably fighting more of the cold mage's army.

 She tore her thoughts away from fear, though, and focused on visions of herself wielding power. She knew that anyone who held Cartheno's Fire would be arrogant; unafraid.

"I could destroy you first," she said, and she flicked a tongue of fire at him and laughed as he flinched.

"I doubt that," he said, aloud, and suddenly Grace was falling.

It's in your mind, she told herself, but she couldn't help cringing as she waited to land, and curling up in an attempt to protect her damaged ribs.

She gasped as she felt herself caught, and held. It was Afi, smiling down at her, in a garden like the one she had just left, but whole. There was no wreckage, no snow falling down, and no burned greenery here. It was living and verdant and lovely as it had been before she had come and used power she couldn't control.

"Here," he said, and he reached out and plucked one of the hot pink flowers and tucked it behind her ear.

You could rule this place with him, you know, the voice whispered to her.

"Stop it," she said, and Afi looked hurt. It was like a knife grinding into her, but she knew that this wasn't real.

Let me show you what the alternative is...

With a rush, she was standing over him instead of being held by him. They weren't in a garden now. It was a dank, cold place in which they stood. Her eyes struggled to make out walls, features – anything. But there was little to see except Afi, who was crouched in front of her with his hands tied behind his back by a glowing cord she knew to be possibility.

"I made him sorry," a voice said out of the darkness, and it sent ripples of cold over her arms. It was Edin, and he sounded so triumphant... and so coldly angry.

"Please," Afi whispered, from the floor. Grace knelt down, her knees sinking into unmentionable filth on the floor.

It still isn't real, she thought, but she still wanted to comfort him. He was shivering with cold, and there was blood oozing out along cuts and gashes on his arms and chest. It was the hardest thing she could remember doing, keeping her hands by her side.

"It's too late to beg," Edin's voice said, and she realised that he was approaching, his huge pale eyes luminous in the dark. "You shouldn't have let them take me. And you should have come to help me, years and years ago."

Such a shame he doesn't have the power of his brother, the whisper said. He might have overpowered him, instead of being caught by him.  

"I don't believe you," Grace said back, and Afi's head jerked upwards.

"Grace?" he asked, and with horror she saw that he had been blinded, his eyes hollows crusted with dry blood.

My master would spare him, if you promised to help him. He would heal him, too. Give him back his sight.

Grace knew that she should play along with the mage, and pretend to be won over by him. It would buy precious minutes for Ruidic. But she was revolted by all this, and tired of letting him walk through her mind. And more than anything, she was afraid that what she was seeing was true, and she couldn't bear it.

"No," she said, and she drew her will behind a symbol of conjuring and blasted fire at Afi, at Edin, at this dungeon they were in, blotting it all out until she heard a curse from that gravelly voice. "I would never join you. It doesn't matter what you offer me!" she shouted.

Between one blink and the next, she was back in the garden, and the mage was flinching away from a blast of fire. It was smaller than the last, this one: more controlled. She tried not to let herself think that this was because she was draining herself little by little. She couldn't afford to let him see the thought in her mind.

She saw his hand go to his face, and realised that she had burned it again, leaving blistered flesh across his left cheek now as well. He hissed between his teeth, and then he started to walk towards her. He seemed to become larger with every step, and she wished she could stand instead of lying there.

"Do you think you can win out?" he asked her. "Do you think you can stand against him? With a weapon you don't understand how to use and a few fools with all the magic of a group of street performers?"

"Yes," she said, and even though she was terrified again – or perhaps because she was terrified and needed to hear it - she lifted her chin and repeated it. "Yes, I do."

He shook his head, and for a moment seemed human, and nothing more than frustrated. "You can never win. The life you seek to protect can never stand against the cold. Don't you see how they all slide, sooner or later? Every riezehn eventually uses his power to hurt. The rich push the poor further and further down in order to climb higher and higher."

He snapped his fingers, and she found herself dragged upwards, her chest screaming in pain and another jab of pain from her leg coming with it. He held her in front of him with his power, as he had done before, and her only thought was that at least he couldn't stamp on her like this.

"Even your precious Queen who believed in ideals of life and liberty. She turned against her own people to live in an illusion."

Grace saw movement behind him, and for a moment, she thought that she was imagining things; or that he was playing with her mind again. It was the Queen she saw, barefoot and dressed in her flowing white robes. She walked through the garden as if in nightmare, her eyes gazing on the burned trees and the fallen spire and the snow that was building up into drifts in the centre of it.

"Can you not see the creatures we all create?" he asked her, and she saw them dancing across her vision one by one. "Nightmares and evanescents; flesh wolves and bloodsuckers. They are testament to the human desire to destroy. And in embracing that desire, I have more power than you can imagine."

Grace saw them all, and she despaired, for a moment, as she had when she had read the book back in Afi's cabin. But then she remembered the first time she had met the hunter, and she remembered the chimri.

Someone created that too, she thought. A creature with no use to us; something that is just wonderful, and beautiful, and warm.

She smiled at the mage, her eyes drifting past him to the Queen, who had arrived at the centre of Grace's destruction. The burned trees and plants had left a clear, uninterrupted view right to the surviving crystal of the dome, and the Queen paused to look out on her city. Grace wondered what she saw out there. Did she see the army massing outside the wall? Did she see the destruction of her kingdom? Or did she see hope written in those cities, as Grace had?

Come on, Ruidic, she thought. Give me a miracle.

She saw the mage's expression change as he looked at her. His frustration became, in an instant, an uncontainable towering rage and she knew he was going to destroy her because he understood that he couldn't win her round. But in his rage, he suddenly seemed childish, and weak. Faced with her own end, she was no longer afraid of him.

She saw him raise each hand, sickly green energy pouring and bubbling out of them. She waited for the light to grow and consume her within that awful green. But when the light came, it was golden-white, and  so bright that it blotted him from her vision.