EPILOGUE

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The cat was large, used to feeding on the rubbish and scrapings thrown out the kitchen window and occasionally on the also overfed and lazy rats. He was a tom, black, with a white face and tail. He had no name that he knew of, but someone was calling for him. That someone wanted him. Needed him.

He did not usually venture up into the room where the old man sat, the room with the gaping doors and the moon windows. The doors made his spine tingle and his pads cold. But this time he leapt up the stairs with his belly swinging below him. He passed the cold body of a young wizard sprawled at the top. And then two others, and between them, the body of a dog.

Once he was in the throne room, the calling thrilled him, filling his mind and all his senses. And there, standing inside one of the thickly curtained doorways and facing a young man, an orderly still on his feet, was a woman. To the cat’s mind, she was both old and young, weak and strong. All-seeing but in need of his wisdom, his sight. He leapt into the woman’s arms, and she was inside him, his mind was with hers, and then, in a moment, his was gone.

“What is your name?” the woman asked the man.

The young man did not look away from her. “Monmouth,” he said. “What is yours?”

The woman laughed, filling the stone hall with her echoes. “You are not even an apprenticed wizard, and you ask me this? I have fed myself on the lives of your masters who lie cold behind you, and you stand to request my name?” She stepped toward him.

“I do,” he said, and did not so much as shift his feet.

She stepped even closer, stroking the heavy cat’s head. “Then wake your doddering master Carnassus, and tell him this, if your mouth will hold the words: Nimiane, dread Queen of Endor, last in Niac’s line, whose voice destroyed the magic of FitzFaeren, boiled up the sea to shatter the strength of Amram, and laid Merlinis to rest beneath the wood, once bound by Mordecai, Amram’s son, has shaken off her chains as her fathers shook off the blood of Adam, and comes to see if an old man remembers vows he made when he was young.

“New prey waits on the Witch-Dogs.”