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Silence he had imposed on those who knew of Faerie, so they had been free to inform their friends, trusting to the impossibility of it all to enforce discretion. But what had Darrell told Myra?
    “I’ve felt something similar once,” Myra continued darkly. “At a Renaissance fair down in Athens. The weather was freaky there too.”
    “I heard about that,” David replied. “Did a lot of damage and all.”
    “Real freaky,” Myra repeated; then, more lightly: “Hey, how ’bout holding that pose for a while!”
    “Sure,” David said, looking a little puzzled. He froze where he was: leaning against the van with one of the awning poles in his hand. Myra applied herself to her drawing. A moment later she was finished, and handed him the pad for perusal.
    Goosebumps prickled over him. It was him, all right, but Myra had changed his shirt to a coat of ring mail, his bandanna to a cap of iron, and the pole to a wildly barbed spear. But what gave him pause was the background she had sketched in: a desolate, wind-swept shore covered with shattered trees. The sun was unnaturally huge and fiery and directly above his head, its entire many-rayed disc shadowed by the outstretched wings of an eagle. David had seen them both before: for the sun was twin to that which was emblazoned on the surcotes of Lugh’s warriors, and the eagle was the sign of the royal house of Erenn: that of Finvarra.
    “Nice,” David said, “but where’d you get this symbol?”
    Myra would not meet his eyes. “I…I don’t know, it…it just came to me.”
    Thunder sounded then, and the rains returned. His friends pounded up from the beach.
    “Can I have this?” David asked.
    Myra nodded. “I’d like to draw you again, sometime, too. You’ve got a real nice body.”
    David blushed and looked away.
    Gary was the first one to the van, having beaten his running rival, Darrell. “Christ, is this rain never gonna stop?”
    “When the sun beats the eagle,” Myra said, and fell silent.
    David, crouched in the back, could only stare at her and wonder.

Chapter III: Carolina Reverie
    (Sylva, North Carolina—Friday, June 13—sunset)
    The sun was still a hand’s breadth above the western mountains when Calvin McIntosh pushed through the screen door and padded onto the cabin’s porch. He scratched his bottom through a convenient hole in his jeans, settled himself into the unpainted rocker that in the last year or so he had come to think of as his own, and gazed out at the vista beyond the peeled pine railing: mountains upon mountains as far as his very sharp eyes could see—maybe all the way west to Tennessee or south to Georgia. Closer in were the beeches and oaks and ashes that crowded around the cabin, their leafy summits level with the porch’s cantilever floor because of the steepness of the slope. But they rapidly lost their definition as he stared further into the haze of the Smokies. And lingering near the sun were clouds, also in long, low layers, so that Calvin could not be sure where land ended and sky began.
    So be it, then. Maybe it was not wise to think of the two as separate. Everything was ultimately one; that was one of the things he had learned here at the haven he shared with Sandy.
    One of many things.
    Sandy Fairfax was somewhere in her middle twenties and taught physics in the local high school; he had only left his teens a month before and did nothing at all that would make sense on an employment form except wander around and learn, but somehow it had never mattered to either of them. He asked questions about things he didn’t understand, and she answered; she wondered about things she didn’t comprehend, and he speculated. She gave him science and economics and business and philosophy and ethics (and food to eat—what he didn’t hunt—and a fine motorcycle to ride a roof and a bed to share); and he gave her woodscraft and herblore and metaphysics and magic (and the sweat of his brow often enough, like today when he’d