Triplet

"Then you automatically expose Ms. mal ce Taeger to greater danger," Hart responded coolly. "Is that how conscientious Couriers do things?"

"And what if you get caught?"

"What of it? I'm not your responsibility; Danae is."

Ravagin felt his molars grinding together. "And you don't think it would endanger her for you to be caught and questioned?" he snapped.

"No," Hart said calmly. "I've been trained to resist that sort of interrogation—certainly for the few days it'll take you to get her to safety. Face facts, Ravagin: letting me draw off the pursuit is the best chance you've got, and you know it."

"Hart—damn." Ravagin sighed. "All right, you win. But you get yourself killed out there and you'll be in big trouble."

Hart smiled slightly. "I'll remember that." He nodded toward Danae. "Something's happening."

Ravagin shifted his attention. "She's coming out of it, I think," he said. "She's starting to cast shadows again..."

And with an abrupt gasp, Danae collapsed to the ground.

Ravagin and Hart reached her at about the same time. "Danae?" Ravagin called tentatively, patting her cheek. "Danae? Come on, come on—say something."

"Not till you stop shouting and slapping me," she said hoarsely, her eyes still squeezed shut. "Oh, that's loud. What time is it, anyway, noon?"

"About dawn," Hart told her. "Are you having problems with your eyes?"

"You could say that. I don't think I can open them—it's too bright out there."

Hart threw Ravagin an odd look. "I'll shade them with my hand. Okay; try opening them a bit."

"No—no good," she said. "It's still too bright. God, I hope this isn't permanent."

"We'll just have to wait and see," Ravagin told her, fishing a handkerchief from his pocket. "Let's try a blindfold, see if that at least cuts down the glare."

"Yes," she said slowly a minute later. "Yes, that helps. Everything else seems okay. I, uh—do I look okay otherwise?"

"Near as I can tell," Ravagin assured her. "So... what happened?"

"The demogorgon took me back to the fourth world. It's weird there, Ravagin—really weird. Oh, and I got the spell we need, too. But I can only use it once."

"Why?" Hart asked.

"The demogorgon said it would fade from my memory after I'd done it once."

"I take it you didn't mention your mnemonic training—"

"He already knew about it. Said it wouldn't make any difference. God, that's bright. Well; you ready to become invisible to spirits?"

Hart and Ravagin exchanged glances. "Whenever you're ready," Ravagin told her. "Any idea how long the spell's good for, by the way?"

"Not really. All he told me was that it would last long enough."

"I hope he knew what he was talking about," Hart muttered.

"Me, too," Danae nodded with a shiver. "Well... help me sit up a little."

Ravagin complied, sitting down next to her and putting his arm around her shoulders to give her some support. Hart, he noted peripherially, had taken advantage of the distraction to quietly move a meter away from them. "Ready?" Danae asked.

"Yes," Ravagin nodded.

"Okay. By the way, the demogorgon warned me this might hurt a little."

The demogorgon turned out to be right.

Chapter 28

"If it helps any," Ravagin's voice came, too loudly, in her ears, "it looks like a line of storm clouds will be blocking off the sun in a half-hour or less. If they don't dissipate too quickly, they ought to keep it under cover until sundown."

Danae didn't reply. She was thoroughly sick of this whole mess. Sick of the blinding white glare that continued to burn into her eyes through both eyelids and three wrappings of cloth, sick of the loud swish-thud of their horse's hooves in the tall grass, sick of the exaggerated rolling motion of the animal and of the oppressive pressure of Ravagin's body pressing against her back. The encounter with the demogorgon had effectively left her in a reverse sensory deprivation tank, and after nearly half a day of it she was ready to go insane.

She'd risked her life to buy them all a way to escape. A difficult, dangerous decision, one she'd made in a responsible, adult ma

Behind her, Ravagin cleared his throat—a loud, raspy sound. "Look, Danae, we're going to be arriving at Findral fairly soon, and I'd like to be back on speaking terms before we get there. I understand why you're mad, but Hart was determined to go ahead with it, the same way you were hell-bent on doing the demogorgon invocation yourself. You can hardly defend one example of bullheadedness and not the other, now, can you?"

Danae gritted her teeth hard enough to hurt. "Oh, you understand why I'm mad, do you? Well, maybe you think you do, but then your style of thinking has never been too good where my feelings have been concerned."

"So explain it to me. Come on—the silent treatment's gone on long enough."

She took a deep breath. "Did it ever occur to you that I just might like to have some input into a major decision like that? That as a thinking, rational part of this team I had a right to be in on it? No, of course it didn't. I'm just Danae, the brainless heiress who has to be taken care of like she was still eight years old."

Ravagin waited until she was finished, until the echoes of her voice had faded from her sensitized ears. "I suppose that's one way to look at it," he said. "It's not the way I intended it, but... Well, all right. Suppose you'd been consulted. What would you have said?"

"What difference does it make now?"

"Come on, humor me. Would you have agreed to let Hart risk his life drawing the pursuit away?"

"Agree to let him get himself killed, you mean? Of course I wouldn't have."

"But that's his job, isn't it? He's paid for taking this kind of risk for you—and for getting killed in the process, if it comes down to that. Right?"

"That is about as cold-blooded—"

"No, answer the question first. Isn't that his job?"

She tried forming three denials... but none of them made it past her lips, and eventually she gave up.

"All right," she sighed. "Yes, I suppose that's how he sees it."

"All right, then. From his point of view, this decoy plan was the best way he could see to do his job.

You wouldn't have been able to change his mind. All an argument would have accomplished would have been to make him wonder whether he should instead have stayed here at your side... and that kind of doubt would have been a handicap he might never have gotten rid of. Is that what you would have wanted, to have given him something else to have to fight?"

"No, of course not—"

"Fine. Then you're saying you'd have been able to sit here, hiding all of your doubts where he couldn't see them, and given him your permission to go off and get himself killed in your behalf?"

"You make it sound so damn brutal..." She trailed off as her brain suddenly registered something her ears had picked up. Something in Ravagin's voice.... "That is what happened, isn't it? Only with you doing it instead of me? You didn't like the plan, either."

"It's the best possible plan for our safety—yours and mine." Abruptly, Ravagin sounded very tired.

"It's also the worst possible one for Hart."

For a long minute there was no sound but the swish-thud of the horse's hooves and the droning of wind and distant insects. "It's not a matter of being treated like a child, Danae," Ravagin said at last.

"It's the simple fact that there are certain no-win situations in this universe—and a no-win situation requires a no-win decision. When you've lived through enough of them, the way Hart and I have, you begin to realize that sharing the guilt around with others doesn't make your piece of it any easier to carry."