The queen glided up to her. "Hold her, Nathan."

"I don't need to be restrained."

"It's for your comfort, child. And his." In those silver eyes Kai saw a sadness eerily like she'd seen in Nathan's a moment ago. "I offered you a choice, but Winter's choices are always hard."

Nathan moved behind her and wrapped his arms around her. The queen placed her hands on Kai's face, one on each side, and Kai had a moment to think how normal they felt  -  dry and a little cooler than human, but they were just hands.

Then a scream of white sliced her open.

Kai came back to herself slowly, her head splitting, her mind wholly befuddled. Beneath her aching head, softness... ah, her mother's lap, and her mother was humming an old lullaby, one she hadn't heard in so long...

No. Not her mother. Kai's eyes opened.

She lay on the ground with her head pillowed on warm fur that rose and fell in a slow, sleeping rhythm. Dell. It was the Queen of Winter who was humming the wordless tune Sitsi Tallman Michalski used to croon to her daughter when Kai was ill or troubled by night fears.

A tune she'd stolen straight from Kai's mind. Kai started to jerk up  -  and fell back, groaning. Dell gave a protesting grunt.

"Shh. Give yourself a moment. The pain will fade soon." One of those deceptively normal hands reached out to stroke her temple, and the pain receded. "I would like to meet your grandfather. Perhaps Coyote will introduce us."

"I don't think..." But maybe Grandfather did know Coyote. How could she say? He didn't talk about his spirit guides. Maybe he had daily conversations with the trickster god. "I don't think he has a high opinion of Coyote," she said, amending her original thought. "Maybe you should ask Changing Woman or First Man."

Perfect eyebrows arched up. "You are indeed feeling better if you can argue with me."

Kai sat up, moving slowly this time. Her head pounded, but it was no more than an ordinary headache now, and already her memory of what had happened was fading. The examination had taken her to every significant event in her life connected with her Gift... at once. Every memory, even those she could have sworn she didn't possess. She'd been a baby when her Gift was suppressed. How could she have any memory of that? But she'd gone there, and to so many others, all of them laid open to an overwhelming and intimate presence.

Nathan sat cross-legged nearby, his face cleaned of expression, unreadable. Behind him approaching dawn banded the sky in shades of gray, with the widest band the same steel as his eyes.

Dawn. Dawn was near, lifting the blackness. She'd been... away... longer than she'd realized. She searched Nathan's eyes for the answer she needed.

He invented smiles again. This one arrived as fresh as the dawn behind him  -  a smile holding hints of tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow.

Her eyes stung. "She isn't going to kill me."

"No, and nor is the Huntsman. But you may not like the solution she's found."

The Huntsman. Kai looked around, but he was nowhere in sight.

"My brother's a restless sort," the queen said, rising fluidly to her feet. "He's off to other hunts, or possibly to sleep. Dell remains yours," she added, looking down at Kai. "That was her choice. But you can't remain here."

Kai scrambled to her feet. "What do you mean?"

"I've decided on a testing. You have three quests to perform, Kai Tallman Michalski." The rich voice deepened, seeming to echo in the still air. "Three quests that will take you far from this realm, where none can defend against you. You will be allowed to prove yourself and find the true nature of your Gift. Do not suppress it any longer, or it will take you over."

"I don't  -  "

"The fugue, child. What you call fugue. You must learn to use your Gift fully." Solemnity dropped from her as suddenly as it had arrived. She made a little huff of sound, exasperated. "Human-sidhe mixes produce the oddest results sometimes."

"I'm not sidhe!"

"Only a little, true, but that little has had quite an effect. Nathan was correct when he said you weren't a binder, but neither are you precisely not a binder. Your Gift is unlike any I've seen." She turned to Nathan and held out her hands, smiling.

He rose and took them. "It is very strange to get what I've needed for so long, and what I wanted even more, and find I was wrong about the one."

"And right about the other." There followed more of those liquid syllables that had no meaning for Kai.

Nathan chuckled. "Fare thee well, my queen."

"And thee, my hound." She dropped his hands, turned, and a slit opened in the air before her. But she paused to glance over her shoulder, a spark of glee in those silvery eyes. This time she looked about ten, and full of mischief. "Do not worry about your grandfather, Kai. I will explain to him. Nor will the police chief trouble you again."

"But what  -  "

She was gone.

Nathan felt the queen leave as clearly as he saw it. Yet she wasn't fully absent, not as she had been for all the long years of separation. She had come when he called  -  come the second he called her, leaving her court, the press of duty and love and need and laughter there. She had come.

As he would go to her if she called. That had always been true. But now he knew that she, too, would come to him.

Yesterday he hadn't known he needed that. Today he did.

"Did you think," she'd said, "I'd gone through all the grief of setting you free  -  and put you through it, too  -  only so I could force you back into shapes of body and mind no longer yours? You are still my hound, as I am your queen. But now you are your own, as well."

Today many things were clear to him. He'd been foolish. He could see that now  -  how foolish he'd been in thinking the queen hadn't known from the moment she sent him here that by the time he could return, he would no longer need to.

He went to Kai and slid an arm around her waist. "Are you..."

"Okay" wasn't the right word. What was? She'd be struggling  -  her life nearly lost, then saved, and now overturned. "Unbearably confused," he finished, "or simply overwhelmed?"

"Yes! Yes and yes." She laughed, or choked  -  the sound held both. "I'm to leave? To leave Earth?"