Annika also considered it an honor to be part of the council of war. “We must protect Bran, so he can make the star safe if I find it. But . . . the compass doesn’t say where to go when we have it safe.”

“Not yet.”

“It’s a lot to take on faith.”

“Got a better option, Mr. Bright Side?” Riley asked Doyle.

“We go anywhere. Get the star, secure the star, then go anywhere until we know. I’ve looked for centuries, and never got close, to the star or Nerezza, until the day in the cave on Corfu. If we’re booking odds, they’re long for us to find all three in a matter of months. And then find the Island of Glass?”

“We’re six.” Sawyer took Annika’s hand in a firm grip. “We have two months more, and that’s it. I don’t believe, not for a second, we won’t find them before that.”

“If I must go back to the sea before . . . I can still help. I will help.”

“We’re not even going there,” Sawyer began, pausing only when Bran came out. “Everything okay?”

“It is. She’s . . . amazing. I didn’t disturb her—doubt I could have.”

“What’s she painting?” Riley wanted to know.

“Beauty, and I believe the place to send the Water Star. I believe the place we’re to go once we have it.”

“Where? If we can pin it down, I can start working on a house or villa, or a bunch of pup tents.”

Bran merely smiled at Riley. “If I’m reading the painting correctly, that won’t be necessary. As it’s my house in Ireland she paints—to my eye. The house I built at the end of a path, the painting she created before any of us met. The one I bought before I knew her.”

“Another island.” Riley sat back. “So that fits. Coast?”

“West. It’s in Clare, where Doyle is from. I think it’s a fine fit, yes.”

“We’d stay at your house. Oh, I would like that very much. It must be beautiful.”

“For me, it is,” he told Annika. “And there’s room enough for all of us. I wondered when I had it done why I wanted such a large place, but I saw it in my head, felt it should be just so, and that’s what I did. Problem?” he said to Doyle.

“I haven’t been back to Ireland in some time, and to Clare in longer yet. I should’ve known this would be a part of it. Well, you can fill Bran in on what we’ve worked out.”

When he rose, walked away, Annika looked after him. “It hurts his heart.”

“Going back to where he started, to where he lived when he just lived. That’s a price to pay.” Riley rose. “I’ll go piss him off about something, get his mind off it. Clare,” she said to Bran. “Your family’s from Sligo, but you built a house in Clare.”

“It called to me, the path, and what was at the end of it. The ruins of an old manor on the cliffs above the thrashing sea. Different from the rolling hills of my birth, but it called to me.”

“I guess this is why. I’m going to piss Doyle off, then pack. Might as well be ready to go.”

By noon Sawyer sat on the terrace watching Sasha. No one wanted her left alone for long, and he’d opted to sit there for an hour while Bran worked.

He’d set up a table, cleaned his guns. After that he laid out his map of Ireland, and watched his compass glide unerringly to the coast of County Clare.

He told himself not to worry about Annika, and not to think about time other than whatever year, month, night Riley chose. But his mind circled around all of that, until he really focused in on Sasha’s painting.

He didn’t know a lot about art, other than what appealed to him or didn’t. And knew nothing at all about the creating of it, except for what he’d watched Sasha do when she sketched or painted.

What lived on the canvas now struck him as ridiculously beautiful. Almost impossibly. The light—how did she create that luminous, inside-a-seashell sort of light?—just bloomed over a stately (that was the word that kept coming back to him) stone manor. All tall, arched, leaded-glass windows. It held two towers, round and peaked, and what he supposed were terraces built to resemble battlements.

Flowers and shrubs spread at its feet like colorful skirts, and trees, summer green, spread their shade, dappling the spread of grass, greener than emeralds.

And all of it rose above cliffs, dramatic, stormy gray, and the thundering sea that crashed below.

He could see Bran there, perfectly. The magician in his cliffside castle. For himself, when he settled, he’d look for a cottage-type place, on the beach somewhere—anywhere—with blue water and the sway of palms. But he could see the heart-clutching appeal of Bran’s home on the cliffs.

When Sasha stepped back, he started to speak. But one look at her eyes had him holding his silence.

She picked up the painting, set it on the worktable, then propped her sketch pad on the easel.

So there was more.

After opening a box, she picked up colored chalk, and began to sweep and guide it over the page.

He watched Annika come to life, but as he’d never seen her. Rising up in the water, or so it seemed to him, her face toward the surface, and transported. Her hair swirling through the impossible blue.

For a moment Sawyer thought it was like watching a photograph develop, so quick and sure were Sasha’s strokes.