happened while she fought the Lentu.
Keshnu sent more waves of concern at her, each falling in time with the gently-shifting colours of the wind, lulling away her memories of the fight, smoothing the tension out of the grip she held on her identity. Her link with the Sherim rose to the fore again. She exchanged a glance with the Gift-Giver, relishing in the shared confidence that had been so lacking since she received the Second Gift.
For a moment, she allowed the contact to linger, drowning in the compassion of Keshnu's gaze. Warmth suffused her in return, a cascade of feelings that the mongrel logic of the Sherim translated into painfully familiar sensations. The scent of clean homespun and home-made preserves, the peculiarly rich colours sunset always brought in memories from her childhood, the rumble heard through the floorboards as her father talked late into the night.
She nodded - at least, as far as she could tell - and began to twist her hands apart, the ache in her finger slinking back as she did so. The air between her palms stiffened, weight inherited from the Sherim to which she'd bound it. Grunting, she wrenched harder and felt the tangle of fraying Realmspace start to slide apart.
Keshnu's hands on her head were like the bricks of a hearth, unyielding but never unkind. He steadied her as great gales of light spilled out of the Second Realm across them both. The world - the First Realm - roared in answer to the challenge, surging into the shelds of the Sherim and up through them into the fingers of Dora's right hand. She caught the torrent of Second Realmstuff in her left.
It was, she saw in a moment of clarity, a matter of balance. The contact surfaces of the ashtmer and ghiten - the points of interchange between logics and physics, between the world of sensation and the world of matter - had settled together with the realms pressing on them in a particular way. Restore those levels of pressure and the system would stabilise.
Keshnu's shocked admiration blossomed like a lily in a whirlpool, hopelessly adrift. Dora smiled, knowing the Gift-Giver would understand her showing-off, knowing the Gift-Giver better than it knew itself. Steadily, delicately, she began to thread the streams back into alignment. She'd expected it to be like knitting, but it was more like tying a bootlace.
Several bootlaces at the same time. She didn't have enough fingers. Four dimensions of the First Realm wasn't too bad, but even cheating, the Second Realm had four and a half. She tried to take the spare half on her thumb and found the eight threads already pressing against that hand threatening to split her fingers. Lines of pain traced up her knuckles.
She had the threads paired up wrong, but something told her there wouldn't be time to rearrange them. If she could risk letting go of them at all. What would happen if she let Second Realmstuff spill freely into the First Realm? Very little that was biological could endure the proximity of the Second Realm unchanged. It felt like she'd trapped her hand between millstones. How long could she endure unchanged?
She needed help, but Keshnu was completely out of his depth. Small hope Wolpan would turn out be any use, either. Dora couldn't even feel the Four Knot, though Thia's dormant, battered Gift niggled like a fly in the corner of the room. She made a forlorn effort to reach Keshnu, but the Gift-Giver showed no sign he'd felt her appeal. She only had herself to rely upon.
As simply as that, she stepped past herself, aura shining as she lifted the errant threads of the Second Realm. She met her own eyes, felt the smile ripple between herself and herself, reinforcing itself with each echo. I can hold this; I'll do the weaving. There was no ambiguity in the thought. She knew exactly which of her each I referred to.
Four hands met in an intricate dance, weaving back and forth, around and through one another. There was no question of resistance when her hand led three threads of the Second Realm through her wrist. She met her eyes again, a flicker of humour at the lopsided corner of her smile. Her eyes flashed, a warning to concentrate, but there was a twinkle to it that said she understood.
Layered, rich in dimensions neither human nor Wilder had ever seen all of, the knot of the Sherim took shape. It wasn't beautiful, at least in any normal understanding of the term. It looked... well, it looked like the distended tree that housed the Sherim, stripped of bark and the pine blues and greens of its leaves. Where sluggish channels of vegetable life had flowed through the tree, she could see currents of Realmstuff charged with Wild Power.
A final twist settled the balance back together, spinning the world until Dora fell back into herself. The glow of the Sherim faded, vibrant Second-Realm colours receding behind a veil of blue-green pine needles, blue sky and green grass. Dora glanced downhill, checked that Wolpan and Thia were where she'd left them. The Four Knot was staring up at her, jaw hanging open again. They'd have to have words about that. It wasn't dignified.
Where was Keshnu? The Gift-Giver had been stood right next to her. She could see the gap in the air that he should have filled, where instead there hung a sheet of woven First-Realmstuff, a parody of a human. The weaving was fine, highly detailed. Where the threads were brown wool, she could at least trace the basics of the weave, but it vanished below the threshold of sight when she studied the paler, flesh-coloured patches.
Two discs of silver hung before her eyes, glinting in the sunlight. She flinched as the dangling flap of the thing's arm lifted and brushed her shoulder. The touch was warm, firmer than loose fabric had any right to be. Where Keshnu's face should have been, there were just odd patches of darkness floating in front of the facsimile's blank skin. Dora tried to focus on the dark patches, but they just dizzied her.
Something was visible behind the facsimile's face. She leaned to one side, trying to see past it to the tree-line beyond. It looked almost like one of the trees had sprouted an enormous, incongruous flower, but the facsimile of Keshnu moved with her gaze, blocking her view. She leant back the other way, caught a glimpse of the trees, but there was no flower there.
Shouldn't closing the Sherim properly have cut off the flow Wild Power and stopped stuff like this? Ice ran a finger down Dora's spine. She had no idea what she'd done to the Sherim. What if she'd done the wrong thing? She turned to look, but everything looked right, ashtmer and ghiten snugged up tight within each other. She couldn't see even the faintest hint of a sheld poking through.
A cage closed about her, something falling hard across her eyes and forcing her into darkness. She gasped, twisted, but whatever held her had her tight, arms pinned to her sides below the elbow. A kick generated no better result, her foot meeting only air, her hip complaining as it bent the wrong way. The ground dropped away beneath her planted foot.
The disadvantage of sealing the Sherim was there was no Wild Power to give her strength. She could barely even fill her lungs. Gravity whirled. Dora's stomach whirled with it, but she didn't gag. She should be pleased about that, a quiet voice somewhere in the depths of her mind suggested, but instead she inhaled saliva and all but choked.
Her diaphragm spasmed, but she couldn't curl up to ease the tension. Pain shot up her breastbone, and she managed a desperate shout. Would Wolpan hear? Would she understand? For that matter, would she have the wit to be any use? Might as well hope for Thia to have a miraculous recovery.
Dora strained, reached out for the Sherim. She might not be a Four Knot anymore, but she still had the Gift in her head. She should be able to connect to the Sherim, even if the connection would be inert in the First Realm. Maybe she could pry it open a little way now she knew how they worked. She felt her mind press out into the air around her, obstructed by the concrete monolith of her assailant behind her.
Where was the Sherim? Had she been turned around? She couldn't feel it in front of her. Her mind would only stretch so far; trying to reach further would be like trying to lengthen her arm by dislocating every joint in its length. The joints of her strained consciousness began to ache in sympathy with the idea.
A hood dropped across her head, weighing her mind down, netting it and pulling it back inward, back inside her skull. Well, that explained why Wolpan hadn't r
ushed to her aid. The assailant had help. What if Wolpan was the help? It was possible. The Four Knot had almost killed her a handful of times today already. Where was Keshnu?
Darkness swallowed her. The assailant hadn't taken his hand from her eyes, but the sack over her head tightened all the same. Dora thrashed, but without Wild Power the gesture was foolish. Neither of her captors seemed to have legs for her to kick. Within the darkness, even with the bars of the cage still iron pressed hard into her limbs, she could almost believe she'd been cast adrift in the Second Realm. Blinded, she'd never be able to rationalise the Realm into an intelligible order and get back to safety.
Maybe that was what they'd done; just opened up the Sherim and thrown her through. That meant Wildren. Had Keshnu been one of them? What if Rel had been right about the Gift-Givers? Perhaps they'd realised what the Second Gift enabled her to do and decided to get rid of her.
Well, they'd made their mistake. If this was the Second Realm, then, yes, there was the Sherim. She didn’t need eyes to feel it, somewhere behind her head. Even in the darkness, every tangle of its structure stood out in sharp black-on-black relief. It looked different from this side. Probably what happened