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which Oonanchek was currently taking them was designed to sever the temporary takla that had held them so intimately during the journey south. With the takla dissolved, Jesamine could return to The Four fully prepared for the conflicts to come.
    Magachee caressed Jesamine’s arms and then moved behind her to massage her shoulders. Oonanchek picked up the hunting knife from the blanket beside him, and Jesamine fancied she could see her own reflection in the polished steel blade. She looked proud, serious, and darkly beautiful, although maybe that was also hallucination. The two Ohio chanted softly as Magachee reached forward and cupped Jesamine’s breasts with her hands, and Oonanchek raised the knife to Jesamine’s proffered wrists. Orders were being shouted in some other part of the camp, reminding her of the violent outside world to which she was preparing to return, and Oonanchek, sensing the momentary distraction, paused for a moment before inserting the point of the blade beneath the red cord that bound her, but then, with a swift, upward stroke, he cut the cord, and Magachee spun it quickly off Jesamine’s wrist, at the same time, speaking softly in English.
    “You are free, sweet Jesamine, to return to your primary companions, to The Four, to your true takla .”
    Impulsively, she turned her head and kissed Magachee. She found herself suddenly clinging to the young Ohio woman with the long black hair in an unexpected display of emotional need. “But I don’t want to go back to them.”
    Oonanchek stroked her hair. “We all have our duty, just as we all are subject to our destiny.”
    Jesamine took a deep breath and straightened her shoulders. “Oh, I’ll do what I have to do, if only because I have my pride, but I would still rather stay here and dream with you forever.”
    Oonanchek’s voice was kind but stern. “We, too, give up our dreams and face the fight.”
    Jesamine nodded sadly. “I know.”
    “But the Quodoshka will be with you.”
    “The Quodoshka ?”
    “You will know.”
    The briefest of fleeting visions passed through the interior of the wickiup: a vague, pale shape like that of a loping wolf. Jesamine took a deep breath. “I will know.”
    Knowing she would learn no more, there and then, she concentrated on the future. Returning to The Four was not going to be easy. The others, especially Argo and Cordelia, clearly disapproved of her spending her nights in the camp of Chanchootok and riding by day with the warriors of the Ohio, rather than in the ranks of Albany. She was a major in the Albany Rangers, and she wore the same uniform as Cordelia, but she rode among the fringed and beaded buckskins and the elaborate horned and feathered war bonnets of the aboriginal horseman. She could not explain to the other of The Four how she felt more comfortable among the original inhabitants of this new world, or that the other Americans, the ones whose ancestors had come from across the Northern Ocean, were a little too similar to the Teutons for her ever to be at ease with them. She could try to tell them but she doubted that even Argo and Cordelia would understand, and knew for sure that the others of the Albany elite with whom she was forced to associate never would. Their ingrained prejudices were too strong. Of course, the Americans were not cohorts of the Mosul, they chose their own leaders, they did not share the Teutons’ inventive cruelty, and they did not own slaves, but, although they would invariably deny it, their inborn snobbery would never totally accept the outsider or the foreigner as an equal. The whispering about Jesamine had started almost as soon as she had arrived in Albany. Even when she had been a heroine, one of the saviors of their King, she had been aware of the strange looks and the slightly condescending way in which the courtiers and government officials spoke to her.
    When the Mothmen, the formidable controllers of the Dark Things, had come out of another reality and