She was nervous and upset. Her emotions were beginning to gallop out of control.

The Magus looked down again at the forest below. Brida wondered if he, too, was struggling with his emotions, but she didn’t want to believe in what she was thinking, nor should she.

She knew what the Tradition of the Sun was. She knew that its Teachers taught through space and time. She had thought about this before she first searched him out. She had imagined that they might one day be together as they were now, with no one else near. That is how the Teachers of the Tradition of the Sun

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were—always teaching through action and never giving theory undue importance. She had thought all this before ever coming to the forest, but she had come anyway, because now her path was more important than anything else. She needed to continue the tradition of her many lives.

But now he was behaving like Wicca, who only talked about things.

“Teach me,” she said.

The Magus was staring at the bare, snowy branches. He could, at that moment, forget he was a Teacher and be merely a Magus, a man like any other man. He knew that his Soul Mate was there before him. He could talk about the point of light he could see, and she would believe him, and their reencounter would be complete. Even if she left in tears, she would come back eventually, because he was telling the truth—and she needed him as much as he needed her. That was the wisdom of Soul Mates: they always recognized each other.

But he was a Teacher, and one day, in a village in Spain, he had sworn a sacred oath. That oath said, among other things, that no Teacher should ever force another person to make a choice. He had made that mistake once, and because of that he had spent all those years in exile from the world. Now it was different, but he still didn’t want to take the risk. For a moment, he thought: “I could give up magic for her,” but immediately realized how foolish that thought was. Love didn’t require that kind of renunciation.

True love allowed each person to follow their own path, knowing that they would never lose touch with their Soul Mate.

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He must be patient. He must remember the patience of shepherds and know that, sooner or later, they would be together. That was the Law. And he had believed in that Law all his life.

“What you’re asking me is very simple,” he said at last. He had mastered his emotions; discipline had won out.

“Make sure that when you touch the other person, all your five senses are working, because sex has a life of its own. The moment you begin, you’re no longer in control; it takes control of you. And whatever you bring to it—your fears, your desires, your sensibil-ity—will remain. That’s why people become impotent. When you have sex, take with you to bed only love and your senses, all five of them. Only then will you experience communion with God.”

Brida looked down at the cartridges on the floor. She did not betray her feelings for an instant. She knew what the trick was now, and that, she said to herself, was all she was interested in.

“That’s all I can teach you.”

She did not move. The wild horses were being tamed by the silence.

“Take seven deep, calm breaths and make sure all your senses are working before there’s any physical contact. Just let things take their course.”

He was a Teacher of the Tradition of the Sun. He had come through yet another test. His Soul Mate was also teaching him things.

“Right, I’ve shown you the view from up here. We can go down now.”

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F

She sat distractedly watching the children playing in the square.

Someone had told her once that every city has a “magic place,”

a place where we go when we need to think seriously about life.

That square was her “magic place” in Dublin. It was near the apartment she’d rented when she’d first arrived, full of dreams and expectations. Her plan then had been to enroll as a student at Trinity College and eventually become a professor of literature.

She used to spend a lot of time on that bench, writing poetry and generally trying to behave as her literary idols had.

But the money her father sent wasn’t enough, and she’d had to take a job at the import-export company where she worked now.

Not that she minded; she was happy with what she was doing, and in fact her job was one of the most important things in her life, because it gave a sense of reality to everything and kept her from going mad. It allowed her to maintain a precarious balance between the visible world and the invisible.

The children continued to play. Like her, all of them had once been told stories about fairies and witches, about witches who dressed all in black and offered poisoned apples to poor young girls lost in the forest. None of those children could possibly imagine that a real, live witch was watching them playing now.

That afternoon, Wicca had asked her to try an exercise entirely unrelated to the Tradition of the Moon, an exercise useful to anyone wishing to keep open the bridge between the visible and the invisible.

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It was simple enough. She had to lie down, relax, and imagine one of the main shopping areas in the city. Then she had to concentrate on one particular shop window and notice every detail of what was in the window, where it was, and how much each thing cost. When she had finished the exercise, she had to go to the street and see if she had been right.

Now she was there in the square watching the children. She had just come back from the shop, and the shop window had been exactly as she’d imagined it. She wondered if this really was an exercise for ordinary people, or if her months of training as a witch had helped. She would never know.

But the shopping street she had imagined was very near to her

“magic place.” “Nothing happens by chance,” she thought. Her heart was troubled over a matter she could not resolve: Love. She loved Lorens, she was sure of that. She knew that when she was an adept in the Tradition of the Moon, she would see the point of light above his left shoulder. One afternoon, when they’d gone to a café together to drink a cup of hot chocolate near the tower that had inspired James Joyce’s Ulysses, she had seen that special light in his eyes.

The Magus was right. The Tradition of the Sun was the path of all men, and it was there so that it could be deciphered by anyone who knew how to pray and be patient and who wanted to learn what it had to teach. The more she immersed herself in the Tradition of the Moon, the more she understood and admired the Tradition of the Sun.

The Magus. She was thinking about him again. This was the

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problem that had brought her back to her “magic place.” She had thought about him often since that visit to the hunters’ cabin.

She would like to be there right now so that she could tell him about this latest exercise, but she knew that was just a pretext; what she really wanted was for him to invite her to go for a walk in the forest again. She was sure he would be pleased to see her, and she was beginning to believe, for some mysterious reason—

which she didn’t even dare to think about—that he enjoyed her company, too.

“I’ve always had too vivid an imagination,” she thought, trying to get the Magus out of her head, but knowing that he would soon be back.

She didn’t want to keep thinking about him. She was a woman and familiar with the symptoms of falling in love, something that she had to avoid at all costs. She loved Lorens and wanted things to continue as they were. Her world had changed quite enough.

On Saturday morning, Lorens phoned.