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maturity and adulthood and go back to being what I was. Even if that isn't what I want on the
surface, who knows what I want underneath? Caity's always saying "your mind is not your
friend." Maybe this is what she means?
"No," Eric said with slow reluctance. "Not if I don't want to be fooled."
"You're a Bard now," Greystone pointed out unnecessarily. "That might not have been true the last
time you two tangled, boyo, but it is now. Trust your feelings, Luke.' "
"So you think I should believe in myself?" Eric asked, yawning again. "Is that the answer, Master
Greystone?"
"I think you should go to bed," Greystone said. "You look all in. You can tell me the rest of your
troubles tomorrow. Because if there's one thing I do know about mortals, it's that they don't function well
without sleep or food."
You can say that again, buddy. Eric got to his feet, conscious of how tired he was. Sleep sounded
like the best idea anyone'd had in quite a while.
"Don't wait up," Eric said, stumbling toward the bedroom. He heard Greystone chuckle as he closed
the bedroom door.
He discovered that he was walking through a forest. No, not walking. Almost like swimming;
pushing the branches out of his way and pulling his body along afterwards. The slippery black bark was
cold and silky against his fingers, reminding him unpleasantly of polished bone. The association was so
peculiar that he stopped, holding the branches away from his face as he tried to clear his thoughts. How
had he gotten here, to this weirdwood, anyway?
I'm asleep, Eric realized. Dreaming.
With the ease of practice, he held himself in the lucid dreaming state, not intending to wake up until
he found out what had summoned him here. Was this another warning message from Underhill? Half the
elves he knew would have just sent him an e-mail, and Master Dharinel had already told him everything
he was going to.
So this must be something else one of those odd visions-cum-premonitions that Bards apparently
got from time to time. But who was warning him... and about what?
Ria? But even as he thought the name, Eric realized this was none of her doing. Ria had always been
more straightforward than this in her dealings with him. This was something else, and he'd better find out
what. Feeling a great reluctance to do so, Eric forced himself to study his surroundings.
The bonewood he was in was lit with the sourceless silvery illumination that Eric associated with all
things Underhill, but there the resemblance to the familiar Elfhame Misthold ended. Everything around him
was in shades of silver even the bark on the trees was not truly black, but the deep grey of tarnished
silver. Swags of what looked like Spanish moss festooned their bare branches. Mist lay on the forest
floor like a thick carpet, and in the distance the bone-trees faded to a pale grey in the hazy air before
vanishing entirely.
There was no life in these woods. No birdsong, no small scuttling forest creatures, none of the
playful life he associated with Underhill. Yet this was Underhill, his instincts told him, even if it was an
Underhill much different than any he'd ever known.
This must be what Underhill would be like if the elves were all dead. But that can't be.
Dharinel and Kory both told me that without the elves, there is no Underhill, just Chaos Lands, so
some of the Seleighe Sidhe must be around here somewhere or this place wouldn't have any shape
at all.
Cautiously, but with renewed determination, Eric forced himself onward through the dreaming
wood. The sense of artifice of being an actor moving across a well-dressed but artificial stage was
very strong, and Eric wondered once again what purpose had summoned him here. It wasn't that he was
in the least worried about being able to defend himself. If things got hairy, he could just force himself to
awaken. The dream had only as much power over him as he allowed it to have, but he did feel the need
to find out why he was having it, especially coming as it did on the heels of Ria's appearance and
Dharinel's warning.
It seemed as if he had walked for hours, when slowly Eric became aware that the character of the
weirdwood had changed. He began to hear faint scuttlings behind him they stopped each time he
turned around and now there were faint ghostly shapes flitting about at the edges of his vision: things
with eyes that gleamed like faint red embers. And at last Eric realized why this place seemed so familiar
to him.
"The sedge is withered by the lake/and no birds sing."
This was Keats' haunted wood, home of La Belle Dame Sans Merci. With a lagging sense of
danger, Eric remembered that the Bright Court weren't the only elves inhabiting Underhill who might be
sending him messages. The Unseleighe Sidhe had their home here, too... the Dark Court that had been
the stuff of human nightmares ever since humankind had crawled out of the caves.
Okay. Fun's fun, but this isn't going anywhere I like. Time to wake up now, Eric told himself.
But he couldn't.
Jeanette Campbell came back to Threshold late that afternoon, and spent several hours in her
private lab mixing up enough T-Stroke to waste a large percentage of the population of New York and
the five boroughs. When it was finished, she trundled the cart and its several pounds of white
powder all neatly packed in large brown plastic pharmaceutical jars to the Dirty Lab, where
Threshold drones would have the unenviable labor of packaging it up in five-gram doses for the street.
There was little need to bother with laboratory protocols or sterile conditions down in the Dirty Lab; it
was used mostly for scutwork and mass production, and the people who administered the drugs Jeanette
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