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“If they could, we’d be dead already!”Rhea said fervently.“They could have reset your fight to make sure you lost!They could have—”

“Ifthey had the power,” I said.“But that’s at a premium around here, and time travel takes a lot of it.But even a small talent might allow someone to realize what was going on—”

“And tell everyone else to speed up,” Pritkin said, looking grim.

I grabbed Rhea by the shoulders.“What did you mean, you wanted to stop us from winning.Quickly!”

She stared past me for a second, at the currently empty atrium, then snapped out of it.“You can’t let Mage Pritkin win,” she said quickly.“The fey won’t follow him.They’ll say they will, do all the right things, even crown him.But at the final battle, the Alorestri army doesn’t show up.The gods break through and—”

“Break through where?”I said, shaking her a little, because she kept looking at the damned atrium.“Rhea!”My voice snapped like a whip, and she refocused again.“Where do they come in?”

“Here.In the desert outside Vegas.Where the library landed.”

“The site of Zeus’s humiliation at your hands,” Mircea said to me, and Rhea nodded.

“Yes, he wanted to erase that defeat by using it as the gods’ entry point into Earth.He told me there was a laboratory, one of the sites where his people had done experiments on the creatures of Earth and Faerie in the past.But unlike most, this one had a portal—”

“We’ve seen it,” Mircea said, glancing at me.“Or one like it.But that one was destroyed.”

“Then they must have had another—”

“They had many of them,” Æsubrand said.“I saw the ruins of several as a child.My Father was fascinated by them.”

“—with the ability to move about between worlds,” Rhea finished.“They parked one in the desert and used its portal.”

“But how did they open it?”Pritkin said.“Even if they had such a thing, with Artemis’ spell still intact—”

“My God,” Mircea said, suddenly putting a hand to the wall, as if he needed its help to stay standing.

“What?”I asked, feeling my stomach sink, because he never looked like that.

He looked up at me, and his eyes were terrible.“Dorina—”

It took me a second, and then, “Oh.God.”

“What is it?”Zara said sharply.

“Mircea was lost in Jotunheim,” I said, not having time to go into it all now.“We were in a battle at the portal to that world, and I left him on the other side.With Dorina.”

“You had no choice,” he said.“I never blamed you—”

“Iblamed me.And sent Dory through to find you, and bring you back—”

“Through?”Zara repeated.“How?The way to other worlds is blocked, save for Faerie!”

“Not to my daughter,” Mircea said.“She has the ability to open portals, even ones sealed by Artemis herself.A gift of her lineage.”

“Fortune’s Blade,” I added.

“Yes, that was what they called my wife,” he explained to the others who hadn’t seen the terrible place where the gods had made their servants—and their monsters.And where we’d finally learned the truth about who Elena really was.“The Goddess Fortuna created her to use as a weapon against Zeus, giving her the power to follow him no matter where he went in the Nine Worlds or beyond, but the experiment failed.It was only when she had a child that the blade Fortuna sought was born.”

“Two blades,” I said, because Elena and Mircea had had twins, if very unconventional ones.“And I sent Dory through the portal that the Pythias had, here in the library, to try and bring you back—”

“So she said.”It did not make me feel better that Mircea still looked haunted.

“She found you?”

“Yes, but we were separated in some of the fighting that followed.I made it back to Earth, along with my wife, who was killed in the invasion.But my girls—”