Tania found herself lying sleepless in her darkened bedroom with wide-awake Rathina at her side and Zara seated on the sill of the open window singing quietly to herself and gazing out into the starry London night.

Mr. and Mrs. Palmer had persuaded the reluctant Tania and Edric that they needed to rest before undertaking their task. Tania lay looking at Zara and remembering how she had first met her sister, at the door of her other bedroom in the Royal Palace of Faerie. A newly discovered memory, but of something that seemed to have taken place entire lifetimes ago.

Edric was on the couch downstairs and Jade was in the guest bedroom. Jade had been adamant not to be sent home: “You think I’m going to miss out on all this? No way! I’m staying right here.”

“Will you not at least lie down, Zara?” Rathina asked now, watching their sister with anxious eyes.

“I need no rest, Rathina,” Zara replied gently. “Nor ever shall.”

Tania leaned up on one elbow. “Zara?” Her voice was tentative. “I’m sorry, I don’t really know how to ask this, but what are you?”

Zara smiled, her face bathed in starlight. “Do you fear I am a ghost?” she asked. “That I am the unquiet dead doomed to walk the world?”

“Well, something like that. . . .”

Tania was aware of Rathina alert and tense at her side. “I pray that be not so!” Rathina whispered sharply.

“I am not a ghost,” said Zara. “Mayhap were I to walk the halls and fields of Faerie, it would be as a ghost, for my time there is done—but in this world I am alive, I think.” She sighed but not unhappily. “For a brief time.” She tilted her face upward, as though warming her skin by starlight.

“So, you’re like an angel, or something?” Tania ventured.

Zara laughed gently. “An angel! ’Tis a pretty thought! The angel Zara! It is true that I am not the only Faerie soul to have come to this world to do good deeds for a while before stepping over the Eternal Threshold.”

“Others who died in Faerie have come to this place?” Rathina asked.

Zara nodded. “To shed light in dark corners and to offer comfort to the abandoned and the bereft . . .”

Rathina gasped. “I knew not!”

“Nay, nor should you,” said Zara. “Already I have told you overmuch of things best unknown.” She looked at them. “Sleep, now. I shall watch over you.”

“Sleep?” said Tania. “You’re kidding.”

Zara laughed and made a wafting movement of her hand. “Sleep,” she murmured. “A deep and healing sleep.”

Tania felt drowsy. She saw Rathina’s head hit the pillow. Her own head came down, and the duvet lifted up over her shoulder, although she had not moved it.

The last thing she heard was Zara’s voice, singing a soft lament.

“Tania? Daughter? Do you hear me?”

It was Oberon’s voice, crying out in the darkness. Tania stumbled through the gloom, straining her eyes.

“I can’t see you! Where are you?”

“In the deep dark, my daughter—where none but you shall ever find me!” His voice broke with emotion. “We are lost, my child—betrayed and lost. Cast down, bound in amber, shrouded in silence.”

“Where? What happened?” Her own voice made her head hurt.

“My brother came upon us unawares. The brother I had long forgotten—the brother banished in the lost days before the covenant.”

“Lear!”

“None but he!” Oberon’s voice was wrought with anguish. “He came upon us as we fought to keep the shield of Gildensleep alive. Secretly from out of the frozen north, from beyond even Ynis Borealisis. Great power he has accumulated unto himself over the millennia.”

“What did he do?” shouted Tania. “What has he done?”

“He has taken the throne of Faerie, my child.” Oberon groaned. “And all that were powerful in the Eternal Realm are now encased in amber for all time.”

She was too late! The quest had taken too long—and now all was lost!

“I’ll come to you, Father!” Tania cried as the dream faded. “I’ll awaken everyone. We’ll walk through right now.” She thrashed under the covers, desperate to wake herself up.

“Be wary of my brother, child,” came Oberon’s dwindling voice. “He has grown mighty in witchcraft in the years of his banishment. He will seek to overwhelm you, and I would not have you spend eternity in a prison of unbreakable amber. It is a fearful thing. Awake but frozen of limb, locked in perpetual torment, unable to act while Lear cuts a swath of darkness through both Faerie and the Mortal World!”

Tania could feel her father’s fear and pain, and the growing panic that his Realm and all its people would be lost forever. She had to reassure him.

“I can beat him,” she cried. “I know I can. Trust me, Father!”

“All is lost. . . .” A whisper now, from an impossible distance.

“No! It isn’t!”

“All is lost, all is . . .” The voice was gone.

“No!”

“Sister! Spirits of mercy, what ails you?”

Tania felt hands on her shoulders shaking her awake. She snapped her eyes open. Rathina was kneeling over her in the bed, her eyes dark as sloes. Tania gasped for breath, trembling all over.

Zara stood over her. “What did you dream, Tania?” she asked.

“The King!” Tania said falteringly. “Our father, the King. Trapped in amber. Crying out for help!” She pushed Rathina’s hands away and scrambled out of bed. “This was a mistake. We should never have waited!” She threw on some clothes and then ran for the door. “Rathina, get dressed. I’m going to wake Edric. We have to act now—it may already be too late!” She flung her bedroom door open and ran down the stairs.