"Begone!" the Butler roared, and the husband and wife flinched, and left, each blaming theother for their rejection.

They were left with only one place to drift — the frigid spaces between the stars.

But even there they were not left in peace, for the stars spat at them, and the comets flungblazing embers from their tails at them, and finally that husband and wife drifted to the very edgeof the universe where, in loneliness and hate and recrimination, they prepared to spend theireternity.

Axis stared down at StarLaughter's corpse for a very long time, then raised his head towards the Hawkchilds.

They had finished feeding now, and one of them, StarGrace, hobbled towards him.

"If you think you can persuade us to kill ourselves," she said, her beak rippling into pouting, red-lipped form then back to horned abomination, "then you are very, very wrong. We have no need to chase WolfStar into the mists of death."

"Then I must perforce use a bit of persuasion," Axis said, and, raising his head so that he looked beyond the Hawkchilds, smiled.

StarGrace considered him carefully, then she slowly turned and looked herself.

And gave a scream of rage.

Advancing down the back slopes of the gully were hundreds of ghostly trees, their branches weaving and waving into the dawn sky.

"Fool!" StarGrace said, as she whipped back to Axis. "They cannot catch us!"

And she spread her wings and rose into the air, her companions behind her.

Axis lifted his head to watch them ... and smiled yet again, cold and hard.

Every Hawkchild had been trapped in the net of branches that had extended into impossible heights into the sky. As he watched, the trees pulled their branches back down to earth, dashing each Hawkchild into bloody fragments on rocks and into their own clutching roots.

Again and again the trees raised the corpses of the Hawkchilds into the air, and again and again thundered them earthwards.

When it was all finished the trees retreated, and Axis was left to stare at the now deserted, bloody field of death.

It was only then that he again saw the white wing, splotched with blood and, finally, new horror hit him.

"StarDrifter!" he screamed, and fell to the earth. He scrabbled over to the wing, and grabbed at it, burying his fingers amid the feathers as if by that action alone he could bring his father back. "No! No! No ! "

Far away Qeteb leaned over the snowy tablecloth and squeezed DragonStar's arm. "You mustn't let your sister's and grandfather's deaths distract you. Life must go on after all."

He received no reply, save for a look of implacable hatred.

Qeteb laughed. "Fernbrake next. Fancy a wager on the outcome?"

Again, no reply.

Qeteb was not discouraged. "I must tell you, DragonStar my Enemy, that I have been thinking about this little girl you seem so determined to protect. What was her name? Ah, yes, Katie."

He dragged out Katie's name so wetly it slobbered on the table between them.

"I was thinking, my dear boy, that should one of my companions triumph over of one yours, I might send them after her. To fetch her for me."

Qeteb sat back and rested a forefinger against a cheek, rolling his eyes in a parody of indecision.

"Ah, dear me. Which one to go for? Katie ... or Faraday? You do understand that we are caught in the same fight your father engaged in against Gorgrael, don't you? I am caught in Gorgrael's dilemma. Of two females, I know that one of them will destroy you. But which? Which?"

And Qeteb grinned, for he knew which one it was.

Chapter 57

South, Ever South

Axis buried his grief in action. He was unable to go near Zenith's torn body, and so Urbeth and Ur took what remained of Zenith and StarDrifter (they could only find a few remnants of his wings), and interred them in a gully to the east of Sigholt's ruins.

In death, perhaps, the lovers could be together.

Then both women, backed by the trees, sang a dirge of such beauty that Axis finally bowed his head and sobbed as he leaned against Zared.

"South," Axis said, when it was finally over. "South, for I cannot bear to stand here an instant longer and look at the destruction of my life."

"You still have Azhure," Zared said. "You still have DragonStar."

Axis nodded. "But I have also lost, and that loss will never be regained."

"Until the Field —" Zared began, but Axis had already turned and walked away.

South. South to Fernbrake Lake.

There lay Leagh, about to give birth, and about to do her own battle with the Demon Roxiah. Zared was desperate to get to her, to be there for her, but he was not the only one. Ur also niggled at Axis whenever she got the chance, slipping up behind him when he dismounted after a day ranging ahead with his war band, whispering into his ear as he lay down to sleep at night.

Eventually, she annoyed Axis so much he sent her to the very rear of the column, and set a guard of some twenty-seven Lake Guardsmen over her with strict instructions not to let her near him.

It was not so much Ur's persistence that annoyed Axis, although desperate to be left alone in his grief, but the fact was, he was moving south as fast as he could anyway, and didn't need Ur muttering uselessly every moment she got the chance.

Every day Sal slid faster and faster, and the landscape strode impossibly past, an unnoticed blur.

Axis spent his waking hours fighting — swiping the heads from demented cows, slicing the hearts out of sly boars — and his nights tossing in half-sleep, dreaming of Zenith as a child, and dreaming of that day long, long ago, when he had first met StarDrifter in the snow at the foot of the Icescarp Alps.

His daughter and his father, both, impossibly, gone, and he, uselessly, still remaining.

They drew close to the Minaret Peaks.

Leagh had prepared her circular lying-in chamber with the greatest care. It was pristine and white: the gently drifting curtains, the bed, the tables covered with linens, the porcelain bowls and buckets.

The knives and hooks, of course, were of gleaming steel.

Leagh turned slowly about, inspecting her trap.

But who would it trap? Roxiah ...or her?

Her hand tightened momentarily over her belly. She was huge now, the child squirming, desperate to make its own way in the world.