prologue

Sam stood on the worn grass of the playing field, his coat collar turned up and his hands thrust deep in his pockets. High above him, a lone kestrel hung in the wind, a dark speck against the hard blue sky.

Sam shifted the focus of his mind, and suddenly he was looking down on himself, a hunched figure far below, dark against the green grass. Gazing out through the kestrel’s wild yellow eyes, he felt the play of wind along the surfaces of its wings. Its tail feathers flexed and shifted as it battled to hold its position in the face of the gale. Easing himself into the hot flicker of the bird’s mind, Sam became the kestrel, giving himself over to its fierce instincts as he scanned the grass for signs of prey. The gusting wind sent ripples through the chestnut feathers of his back. In an ecstasy of sky and air, he opened his beak and gave a high, harsh cry. Hanging there against the blue, he thought about how his life had changed since the events of the previous summer. Before that vacation—and his fateful encounter with the bard Amergin—life had been so simple. His greatest challenge had been to finish the latest computer game, his most serious concern how to avoid his parents and their endless museum visits. And then he had awakened Amergin from an ancient sleep and found himself plunged into a world he had never imagined. A world where dark creatures stalked the land, and magic filled the air. Hailed as a long-awaited hero, he stumbled from crisis to crisis, aided by Amergin and Charly, his newfound friends. In the end, though, he had been alone. His strange encounter with the Green Man and the final, desperate battle with the ancient evil of the Malifex had taken place far from any aid. And so it should have ended. Wasn’t that how it happened in books, after all? The bad guy destroyed, the world saved, the hero returned from the field of battle?

Everything is back to normal. Except . . . something remained. The Green Man was gone, as was his evil twin, the Malifex. Their power was dispersed, back into the land from which they had been born. But something lingered from Sam’s encounter. When he had taken on the Green Man’s powers for that short time, some bond had been formed. If that power was dispersed, then some of it, at least, lingered around Sam and marked him out as different. An outsider—a stranger in his own world. Off in the far distance, a bell rang, and instantly Sam was back in his own body once more. The kestrel, free of his control, wheeled out over the chain-link fence that marked the boundary of the playing field and was soon lost to view. With a sigh, Sam turned and began the walk back to the line of school buildings, gray and unwelcoming in the distance.