That hurt. It killed me that I couldn’t just tell her I loved her and make everything better, but it wouldn’t have been honest. I needed to think through the implications of the most recent events.

Silence stretched out between us while I searched for something to say. Finally, I opened my mouth, not knowing what would come out but feeling like I had to say something. I couldn’t bear the thought of leaving her hanging any longer.

Cerice touched my lips with her finger. “Don’t. Not unless you’re really ready. You’ve given me all the time in the world despite the way I’ve treated you. The least I can do is give you the same courtesy. You’ve been telling me you love me for months, not just with words, but with your actions. Let me tell you not just that I love you, but how.”

“I really, really hate to say this,” said Shara, twisting her small fingers in her long purple hair, “but could this maybe wait until we’re somewhere a little less dangerous? I don’t think we want to be here when Clotho gets back. If she’d been any angrier, she’d have been smoking.”

“Yeah,” agreed Melchior. “When you decide to burn a bridge, Cerice, you really toast that sucker.”

Cerice nodded. “Point taken. But I’m not sure we can get out of here. The maze is always hard. When I was ten I was lost in here for almost a week.” She turned slowly in place. “I don’t even see an opening, much less an exit. Maybe that’s because of the quantum computing stuff. Whatever the reason, I don’t know where to start.”

“Only one way to fix that.” I took a closer look at the hedge that surrounded us. I wanted to hear more of what Cerice had to say, but Shara was right—we needed to get moving.

At first glance it seemed as though the growth around us was indeed continuous and unbroken, but as I stepped closer to one wall, there was a flicker, and a neat gate appeared in the hedge. I took another step, keeping my eyes fixed on the opening. As I did so, it flickered again and changed back from opening to wall. That made a weird sort of sense, considering the nature of the quantum bit, or qubit.

In a normal computer, everything is binary. Each bit is either a one or a zero. Qubits, on the other hand, had three states simultaneously, zero, one, and zero/one. So the open gate of a one could instantly become a closed zero. Or in this case, it could and probably should be both. I took another step closer. The gate flickered again, opening. Another step. Flicker, closed. Step. Flicker, open.

“What are you doing?” asked Cerice. “Once you headed for it, that section of hedge went all blurry.”

“Blurry?” That seemed very odd. Sure it flickered as it changed, but the end result was perfectly stable. Wasn’t it? I suddenly remembered my experience with another chaotic system, the faerie rings, and how it differed from everyone else’s. “Tell me what you see, Cerice.”

“All right.” She sounded like someone humoring a sick relative. “I see a section of hedge that looks like it’s just on the other side of a sheet of glass smeared with Vaseline. Until you started paying attention to it, it looked just like the rest of the hedge.”

“Huh.” I took a step forward. The gate flickered closed. “How about now?”

“Same thing.”

“Shara? Melchior?”

“Ditto.”

“Me too, Boss.”

Very interesting. Maybe there were some pluses to this whole chaos power thing after all. Quantum effects are tied very closely to the mathematical foundations of chaos. Time to try an experiment. Reaching inward as I did when casting an old-fashioned spell, I touched the place where my blood tied me to the Primal Chaos and willed the gate back open. A shadow flickered between me and the sun, and the hedge section vanished.

“What did you just do?” asked Cerice. “There’s a gate there now.”

Score! I tried again, focusing my will on the space immediately to the left of the gate I’d just opened. Again the shadow. I was ready for it this time, looking at the ground when it came. Wings! The outline was only there for the briefest fraction of an instant, almost too fast to register, but I had no doubts about what it was. The shadow of a giant raven. I looked up at the hedge. The gate had doubled in width.

“Spooky,” said Melchior.

He didn’t know the half of it. I laughed, a harsh cawing sound, at least to me. “I don’t think we’re going to have much trouble with Clotho’s maze after all. Come on.” I lifted Melchior into my bag, and once Cerice had picked up Shara, I took her free hand. “This way.”

It was easy now to hold the gate open with my mind. We passed through it and into a narrow passage beyond. I focused my will. The shadow came again, and the far wall vanished. After a few dozen repetitions, a gate opened with no hedge beyond it. We were out, and I had taken another tentative step toward the terra incognita called Raven.

“Are you feeling all right, Boss?” Melchior asked from his perch in my bag.

“Why do you ask?” I wasn’t. Not really.

I would use the power because I had to, because power ignored is not power defused. One of the rules of magic is that if you don’t channel power, it will channel you. But I’d never asked for any of this, and frankly, it freaked me out.

A sharp claw poked me in the ribs, and I looked down. Melchior raised one dark blue eyebrow at me. He didn’t buy it. Well, neither did I, but maybe we could both rent to own.

“Forget it,” said Melchior, in a voice that clearly said he wouldn’t. “We can talk about it later. For now, where are we going? And how are we getting there?”

“Cerice?” I turned to her. “You have anything more you want to do here?”

“Nope. I’m done.” She looked around wistfully, like a kid leaving home for the last time. “I’ll miss this place. But I don’t belong here anymore.”

“Shara?”

“I’ve got no agenda, big boy. Well, there’s getting my soul back in one piece, but I don’t even know where to begin on that now that Necessity’s network is closed to us.”

“Then we need to get to Hades,” I said, “to see if Cerberus can help us reach Persephone. We’ll have to go sooner rather than later, but I’d bet Midas’s golden horde that things are going to get ugly fast on that end. We need to rest and regroup a bit before we tackle the big dog.”

“Cambridge?” suggested Cerice.

I shook my head. “Too many people know about that place, the Fates and the Furies topping the list. Likewise Garbage Faerie.”

“You know,” said Melchior, “maybe we need to find a new line of work. The list of places we can’t go back to is getting awfully long. I’m starting to feel about as welcome as Dionysus at an AA meeting.”

I had to chuckle. “You may have something there, little buddy. Let’s try using a faerie ring if there’s one around here. I’ve got a hunch I’d like to play.”

“There’s one over this way,” said Cerice, pulling on the hand she’d never let go of. “What’s this ‘hunch’?”

“Just bear with me; you’ll see in a moment.” Or she wouldn’t if I was wrong. It was more chaos magic, and I didn’t know whether it would work, or whether it was something I should even try.

“All right,” said Cerice. “I’ll wait. I’ll trust you, but only because crazy seems to work for you.”

She led me into a large arbor walled off from the main garden by thick ropes of ivy and climbing roses. It was hard to tell through the profusion of greenery, but the skeleton of the place looked to be an intricate wrought-iron lattice, like something made by a giant clockwork spider. More creepers wove their way through an openwork dome of verdigrised copper pipe.

Underneath lay the circle, and I laughed out loud when I saw it. Maybe Clotho did have a sense of humor after all. It was made up entirely of foot-tall lawn gnomes. They stood or sat facing into the center of the ring in a variety of vaguely rustic poses. All of them were dressed in the classic style, with pointed cap, button-up shirt, baggy trousers, and fuzzy boots. Only, instead of the usual bright colors, all of the clothes except the red hats had been painted over in flesh tones, and each of them wore a little Greek tunic over the top of its other clothes.

“I wonder how Zeus feels about this,” I said.

“I don’t know,” replied Melchior. “But I can’t help noticing the whole place is made out of conductive materials and firmly grounded.”

“There is that. Now, let’s see if this works the way I think it will.”

Cerice nodded, and we crossed into the ring together. I felt a myriad of possible rings open out around me. It was a sensation I was becoming accustomed to. This time, instead of reaching out for a specific place and taking us there, I tried to imagine a series of conditions I wanted met. Someplace safe. Someplace slow. Someplace secret. A refuge. For what felt like ages, nothing happened, nothing physical at least. I could sense something of me reaching out into the ring network, touching first this ring, then that, until finally, I got a sense of connection. Squeezing Cerice’s hand, I moved us forward into . . .

Paradise. That’s the only way to describe it. We stood on a grand marble balcony hanging over a white sand beach on one side of a huge half-circle bay. But this was not the sterile white marble of Zeus’s Olympus. This was a rich, green marble veined with black, like great slabs of gem-quality malachite. Neohedonist instead of neoclassical. A low balustrade of the same marble ran along the edge of the balcony, turning and following a wide flight of stairs down to the beach on my right. The air was humid and tropical, redolent with the smells of greenery and flowers, but not too warm.

Looking directly across the water, I could see mountains reaching down to the far edge of the bay, iron-rich soil exposed here and there by jagged rents in the velvety tropical forest, like a red arm in a tattered emerald sleeve. To my left, the mountains climbed up to a cloud-shrouded peak. To my right the bay opened out into the deep blue sea stretching luxuriously to the horizon. It was one of the most beautiful settings I’d ever seen and I wondered how such a place could be so devoid of people.

“Where are we?” asked Cerice, her tone hushed in wonder.

“Welcome to Raven House,” said a new voice from behind us.

I should have been startled, practically jumping out of my skin. I wasn’t. It was like I’d expected the voice. I let go of Cerice and turned slowly around. I found myself facing a faun in a Hawaiian shirt. He had curly hair and a little soul-patch beard. A thick cluster of leis was wrapped around his equally thick neck. He smiled and stepped forward, lifting one of the leis off and placing it around my neck, then doing the same for Cerice.

“Raven House?” exclaimed Melchior. “That’s ridiculous, there is no such place. And who in Hades’ name are you? You look like the product of a nightmare brought on by eating a pineapple-and-feta-cheese pizza with an ouzo margarita on the side.”

The faun took a much smaller lei from around his wrist and popped it none-too-gently over Melchior’s head. “I am the spirit of this place. If you have problems with my appearance, or its appearance, take them up with your partner’s subconscious. Because this is indeed Raven House.”

Melchior gave me a very hard look as the faun moved on to give Shara a lei. “He’s kidding, right? Tell me you didn’t come up with this. Tell me you have more respect for continuity than to do this.” His gesture took in the great house that rose behind the faun.

It was mostly green marble and aqua-tinted glass, in a sort of high modern mix of classical Greek and nouveau-tiki lounge. It should have been an awful kludge, yet it seemed perfectly harmonized with its environment, the greens blending smoothly into the jungle surrounding it. There was a big open porch behind the balcony, with a fountain centering it and low, comfortable furniture scattered in conversation sets.

I turned to the faun. “Can you fix us a couple of daiquiris?”

“Of course, what would you like?”

“What are the options?”

“You name it, we’ve got it.”

“Guava,” I said. “Cerice?”

“Banana.”

“Done,” said the faun, turning and heading for the bar.

“Looks like paradise to me, Mel. If this is Raven House, I, for one, am in.” I pulled off my leather jacket and slung it over my shoulder.

The webgoblin put his face in his hands. “A faun in a Hawaiian shirt fixing daiquiris is your idea of a power’s proper home. That’s crazy.”

“That’s chaos,” the faun called over his shoulder, “and the Raven is a power of it.”

“Could be worse,” said Shara, shaking her head. “He could be wearing a kilt.”

“Yeah,” I agreed. “It’s a good thing I’m more of a surfer than a golfer.”

Just then the faun returned.

“What should we call you?” I asked, taking my drink.

“I’m tempted to say ‘Id—Id Runamuck.’ But that would be cruel. My name is Haemun. Is there anything else I can get you?”

“Food would be good. Rice, fish, something simple.”

“I’ll get right on it.” Haemun headed for the depths of the house.

“Now,” said Cerice, “I think it’s my turn to talk. At least I think that’s where we were before we left the maze. Just let me get out of this armor.”

She reached to her side and popped the buckles on her breastplate, letting it fall on the thick carpet that set our cluster of furniture off from its surroundings. Her shoulder pieces and bracers followed quickly. Underneath, she wore a thin silk blouse.

“Oh, that’s so much better.” Cerice rolled her shoulders, which did interesting things to the rest of her torso. “Could I impose on you to scratch my back before I make an emotional spectacle of myself?” I stood up and obliged as she peeled off the rest of her gear. “Nice,” she almost purred. “Thank you.” Then she turned and gave me a gentle push toward my chair. “Now, I have some things that need saying.”

“This is where it gets mushy,” said Melchior. “I’ll pass. Shara, you want to help me explore this dump?”

She nodded, and they wandered off together. I smiled after them. Despite Melchior’s harsh words, I knew he was trying to give us some privacy. I appreciated it.

I took a seat and a sip of my drink, then looked at Cerice. “The floor is yours.”

“Right. Where to start . . .” She sipped her drink as well then looked me in the eyes. “How about with this, I love you. I love your reckless abandon. I love that you don’t plot out your hacks and cracks, you just do them. I love the sloppy way you put together spells. I love your courage and the way you never take danger seriously.” She laughed and took another drink. “I guess I love all the things about you that drive me absolutely crazy, and I haven’t the foggiest idea how a House of Fate produced someone like you.”

“You’re not alone there, just ask Lachesis. Perhaps I’m a genetic throwback to the Titans.”

“Whatever the reason, I appreciate it. I’m not sure if you’ve noticed, but I’m a little bit on the anal-retentive side.” She said this with a self-knowing smile and held up her hands a few millimeters apart. “Or maybe a lot.” She spread her arms into a gesture like someone talking about the one that got away. “I plan everything.” She looked at her feet. “Did you know that there’s a spreadsheet tucked away in Shara’s memory entitled ‘Life Plan’ and that the subsheet ‘College’ has a list of what schools I wanted to go to and when?”

“I can’t say I’m surprised.”

“I wrote it when I was thirteen. It included a four-year break between high school and freshman year of college.”

“I’d never have guessed that part. You actually put free time into the list?”

She blushed. “Not free time. I laid out a travel agenda involving visits to all the major mythological sites, when I was going, and for how long, as well as an extended tour of the prime minus one DecLocus with stops in all the big capitals and visits to fifty colleges with great comp-sci departments, just in case I changed my mind about under-grading at a version of MIT.”

“You didn’t change your mind,” I said. I remembered visiting her there the year I was first looking for schools.

“Of course not.” She looked at her feet again. “In fact, when I was fifteen, I added a tentative course schedule to my file. The only reason I changed anything when I finally started taking classes was because some of the things I’d picked out were no longer offered. I always knew exactly what I wanted to do and be.”

“That’s what makes you a great programmer, Cerice. You can hold a thousand lines of code in your head and see whether it’ll do what you want it to.”

“But it didn’t really prepare me for the messiness that is real life. When I discovered that Shara was really an independent being, it completely threw me for a loop. It changed all of my plans and assumptions. I couldn’t just fit smoothly into Clotho’s IT machine anymore. I loved Shara, and I had to do something for her, for her and for all the other webgoblins and trolls with the same problems. So, you know what I did?”

“I can guess. You revised your ‘College Plan’ sheet.”

Cerice laughed. “I did indeed. I changed my Ph.D. thesis subject and went looking for a new advisor, though I stayed with the same school. My proximate plans changed, but my methods stayed exactly the same. I changed the plan, but I still had one. Everything was going to be fine.”

“Then I came along.”

She nodded. “And then you came along. I’d always liked you when we met at joint court events, or when you visited me at MIT, but you were too wild to consider as even practice boyfriend material. I had other plans on the romance front.”

“But?” I asked before finishing my drink.

“But I kept finding things wrong with the guys on the good-boy demi-immortals list. Either they didn’t really turn my crank, or they treated their familiars like shit, or they had inherited their brains from wherever Zeus got his. All along I kept thinking back to you. Then came the day I overheard Atropos and Clotho vote to send Moric and his brothers to kill you. It was another break point. I had to warn you, but that meant some major spontaneous hacking and straight-up defiance of Clotho. I felt sooo guilty. But I couldn’t let them do it.”

I was about to say something, but a subtle cough made me turn my head to find that Haemun had returned. “I’ve put together dinner and set up a table. It’s out on the terrace, where you can watch the sun go down.” He gestured with one hand, collecting our empty glasses with the other. “I’ll just refill these, shall I?”

“Please,” said Cerice, rising and offering me her hand.

Together, we walked out to find a small round table with two place settings side by side facing west. A small bamboo basket had its lid cracked to expose steaming rice, and a warming dish held two grilled ahi steaks beside it, but it hardly registered. The sun had sunk quite low, dipping toward the water while we’d talked on the porch. It was a beautiful evening, with just enough cloud cover to provide the sun a canvas on which to splash a gorgeous abstract painting in blood and fire.

We sat down and, by a sort of mutual unspoken agreement, said nothing as the sun slid the rest of the way into the ocean. It was a half disc just sticking out of the water when Haemun arrived with our drinks. He delivered them so quietly and so smoothly that I barely noticed their arrival or his departure.

I absently reached for mine but stopped midway. The sun had reached the point where it seems to drop precipitously before vanishing. For just an instant after the disc disappeared, the light shone back brightly through the water in a brilliant green flash like some giant solar wink. It took my breath away.

“Gorgeous,” said Cerice. “I’ve read about the green flash, but I’ve never seen it.”

“I don’t think I’ve ever heard of it before. It’s wonderful.” I finished my earlier gesture and collected my drink. “I’m glad that I saw it with you.”

“So am I,” said Cerice.

Then she reached for the serving dishes. It had been a long time since our last meal, and we paid more attention to the food than conversation for a little while. When we slowed down, Cerice caught my eye.

“Where was I?”

“Moric and company had just been dispatched to kill me.”

“Right, and I’d defied Clotho. As awful as that made me feel, I couldn’t convince myself that I’d been wrong, or stop thinking about you. I had to find you and talk to you.”

“And you did, with a little help from Ahllan.”

“I did. Then one thing led to another, and we ended up in bed and I panicked. I wanted you so badly, but you just didn’t fit into the plan. I tried to shut you out at first, but you kept coming back, and pretty soon it killed me every time you left. So guess what I did?”

“Revised the plan?” I raised an eyebrow.

“Uh-huh, now it included a sheet under ‘Ravirn, reforming of.’ Then it turned out Atropos and the other Fates were trying to kill free will, and I got caught up in the fight because I couldn’t let them kill you in the process, and then somehow you won. But you became Raven doing it. Everything was totally messed up and the plan was shot and I panicked again.”

“And shit flows downhill.” It came out harsher than I’d intended, but I had to say it.

“It does,” said Cerice. “It flowed all over you, and I’m so sorry about that. If I’ve lost you, I don’t know what I’ll do about that. But I do know I’m done with plans. The best things in my life are you and Shara and the things I’ve done and learned in helping you oppose Fate. If I’d followed the plan, I’d never have experienced any of it.”

“Cerice, I . . .” Again, I didn’t know what to say, but I felt I had to say something. I did love her. No matter what happened between us, that much was true.

“Please,” she said, “don’t answer me yet. We’ve reached one of the bad places in the story again. Soon, too soon, we’ll leave here and try to fix the Persephone mess. That’s going to be dangerous. You could die. Melchior could die. Shara could die. I could die. No matter what, everything’s going to be different afterward. Answer me then. For now, I just want to make love to you and let tomorrow worry about tomorrow. Is that all right?”

“Yes, and more than all right.” I rose and helped Cerice from her chair. “Shall we find out if this barn has a master suite somewhere?”

“Let’s.”

It did indeed, a huge room on the level above. Instead of marble, the bedroom was carpeted with living moss. Likewise the room’s twin balconies, one of which overlooked the bay, while the other faced the mountains. It was full dark now, and there was not a light to be seen anywhere on the slopes or beach. For all we could tell, there wasn’t another living intelligence anywhere beyond the bounds of Raven House. Stars sprinkled the sky like salt spilled on black velvet, and the Milky Way made a great pale stripe from horizon to horizon.

“This is gorgeous,” said Cerice, from the edge of the bay-side balcony.

I put an arm around her waist. “So are you.”

She laughed lightly and kissed the side of my neck. “That’s very sweet, my dear. But I’m a complete mess at the moment. I saw what looked like a world-class bath through the door over there.” She pointed with her chin. “Want to clean up before we get dirty again? I could really use someone to scrub my back.”

“If you insist.”

I needed a good scrubbing, too. It had been a long time between baths, and I’d been scared silly, shot at, and dropped in a spirea bush since the last one. Cerice led the way into what turned out to be a truly magnificent bathroom. Apparently my subconscious, or whatever part of my psyche had led us to this place, liked its comforts.

A marble tub almost big enough to swim laps in was partially sunk into the floor in the corner, and someone or something had filled it to the brim with steaming water. Three wide steps led up to its edge, and there was another inside to allow you to ease into the depths. A couple of sinks occupied a countertop opposite. A big glass booth in the corner held a half dozen showerheads. The toilet sat in its own smaller room beyond, out of sight of the bathing amenities.

Cerice dipped a hand in the tub. “Perfect!” She started to strip off her clothes.

When she caught me watching, she grinned and started moving slower on the buttons of her red silk blouse, making a show of it. I felt myself hardening in response. Once she had her shirt fully open, she coyly turned away from me and let it fall to the floor, exposing the white skin of her back. Cerice is as tall as I am and very slender, with a runner’s lines, and her back is a work of art. So was her chest, clearly visible in several of the mirrors. Her breasts are small and high, with pale nipples and clearly visible veins running through them, and you can count her ribs from fifteen feet.

Cerice found my eyes in the mirror and grinned. “You like what you see?”

“I always have.”

“I’m glad.”

With one smooth move she slipped her tights and the panties underneath over her hips and down to the floor, then stepped clear. Her long legs are hard with muscle, her buttocks likewise, an athlete’s figure despite the hours spent sitting in front of a computer. She turned to face me again, crossing the distance between us in a few quick steps.

“Aren’t you going to join me?” she asked, her lips inches from mine.

“Of course.” I put my hands on her hips and pulled her closer still.

“Well then.” For a moment she pressed her whole body against mine, catching my lower lip ever so gently in her teeth. “Why don’t you get a move on?” She pulled away and skipped up the steps to the tub, dipping a foot in. “Still perfect.” She gently lowered herself into the water, then flipped over so that her chin was resting on the lip and gave me a flatly appraising look. “Your turn.”

I was very conscious of her eyes as I pulled my T-shirt over my head and took off my boots, actually blushing as I unzipped the fly of my leathers. Being watched felt even sexier than watching Cerice had.

As I stepped up onto the edge of the bath, Cerice rolled onto her back, looking up the length of my body from a point almost between my feet.

“Also perfect,” she said, with a wink. “Or close enough for my tastes at any rate.”

As I slid in beside her, Cerice ran a hand from my ankle to my shoulder. Then she turned her back and handed the soap over her shoulder.

I washed her slowly and thoroughly. Then she washed me in like manner. We just sat for a little while after that, letting the hot water soothe away our aches and completing the process of bringing my knee back to as good as it was ever likely to be again. Then we made gentle love on the edge of the bath, getting water and soap everywhere. Once we’d cleaned up again, we headed out onto the bay-side balcony, where clouds had eaten most of the stars. There was no one else around, and the night air was still warm, so we hadn’t bothered to dress.

“I wish this could last forever,” said Cerice, leaning forward against the railing.

“Me too.” I stood behind her, my arms around her waist, my chin resting on her shoulder. “But it can’t.”

“No, it can’t.”

Something about her tone made me reach up and run a finger along her cheek. It came away wet.

“You’re crying.”

“I’m happy. And sad. And frightened. I don’t want to let this moment go, because I don’t know what will happen next. But I know I have to.”

“I have to find Persephone and try to save the mweb and Shara,” I said, wanting to make it better somehow.

Cerice sighed. “Better make that, we have to find Persephone. After all, Shara’s my familiar.”

I smiled and squeezed her tighter. “All right, we have to find Persephone.”

“Better. But we don’t have to do it right this instant, do we? It can wait till morning?” She pressed her hips back against me.

“It can wait till morning,” I agreed.

“Good.” She reached back between us, guiding me.

As I entered her, it began to rain gently. The storm matched its tempo to ours, rising slowly to a wild pitch and ripping the darkness with lightning as we orgasmed. The air had cooled, but we had not, and we took our pleasure a third time there on the moss that carpeted the balcony in the pounding rain. Finally, exhausted, we toweled off and fell into bed.