“What have you done, man?” Shadra wondered again, her face almost against his.

“We have to leave here,” he forced his voice to be even. “Now!”

“Don’t you wonder—?” she began.

“No,” he caught her up unceremoniously and turned to stride purposefully towards her horse, reaching out for the stud with his mind as he did so. “I don’t have time. I’ll wonder later, after I’ve made certain we’re all still alive to ponder the answers.”

Tossing her up into the saddle, he ran back up the hill to haul his pants on and shove his feet into his boots. Running back, he swung aboard the blue roan. A glance showed Corwyn astride his own mount.

Sandahl’s inquisitive burble echoed in his brain. He turned his head towards the stud, projecting, I think I just made a really big mistake Ol’ Son, and we need to be somewhere that isn’t here by a good distance and fairly quick! Range ahead and find us a hidey hole that’ll give us some protection from the sky!

Sandahl snorted his alarm and glanced skyward before turning southward and launching like a stone from a catapult. Storm put heels to the gelding and took off after him at a hard gallop.

The fugitives spent the first half hour laying along the necks of their sweating horses as Storm set a suicidal pace across the prairie in Sandahl’s wake.

The half hour turned to an hour and the animals were flagging. He called to the stud, slowing the pace a bit, straining to see everything and everywhere at once. There was no trace of pursuit or interdiction, no hint of draconic interest as far as the eye could see. Or that eye, in any case.

He remembered the other world where the colors lived. How had the wizards described it? Inner eye? Wizard’s sight. Closing his physical eyes, he searched inward, looking for the mechanism. And opened his inner eye almost casually, too harried to wonder at the ease of it.

Sandahl, he could see far to his right, a bright, white-gold splotch, far bigger than his physical form, bounding at the end of the thin tether that connected them in this place. Looking down, the blue roan seemed almost puny by comparison.

Turning, he saw Corwyn, looming large, orange-yellow. And keeping pace with the former governor general, Shadra of the purest light. And at last he could see how she’d gotten that name. Brightly burning, an almost searing white was her signature in this existence.

Beyond and up and all around, pushing at the distance to glean it’s secrets, forcing his vision outward against the incorporeal pain of straining senses. Nothing but the tiny specs that were the animals and birds and insects that populated the second world, overlaying the blanket of life that was the plain.

Snapping his inner eye closed, he beheld Shadra staring wide-eyed at him, a look of surprise, confusion, and fear marring her young girl’s features. He filed the look away for later consideration. For the moment, he was busy.

Twice more he allowed the pace to slow as the distance fled beneath the pounding hooves of their tiring mounts and he scoured the skies for signs of pursuit before he allowed them to slow to a walk. Neither Shadra nor Corwyn assayed a comment. They’d know horses at least as well as he, and would know that you didn’t simply stop them after a run like that.

Sandahl reported a cut in the prairie half a stad to the east. Only the slash of an almost dead stream and a mild cutbank, but some small cover from the sky overhead. And there was a bit of water.

Storm turned the weary gelding toward it, swinging from the saddle while the beast still moved. He didn’t look to see whether the other two followed suit. His feet touched the ground and his legs nearly buckled. They felt as though they weighed a hundred kilos apiece. He could only imagine how bad off the horses were.

He heard the rustle of a body approaching through the tall grass to his left. Shadra drew abreast of him, breathing hard with the exertion. He didn’t look over.

After a dozen or so paces, with no word from him, she asked, “where did that come from?” barely suppressed anger coloring her voice.

“What, specifically?”

Another couple of paces before she answered. “That run, to begin. Later, perhaps you’ll tell me when you managed to learn farsight between being untrained this morning and scrying half the plain without a sphere this afternoon. And after that—”

He cut her off with a slice of his hand. “This isn’t really the place—”

She stopped in her tracks while he continued to walk. After a couple of steps, he turned. Corwyn had also stopped, along with the horses he was in charge of. So Storm stopped. He waited for a minute or so, and when they remained rooted, he sighed and turned back.

He stared hard into her eyes, but she wasn’t that afraid. “Look, he assayed, there’s a bit of cover over there just a couple of minutes away and I really don’t want to be standing out here in the open answering questions I don’t understand, particularly since I’ve just gotten through running the horses near to death to get out of the open. Seems wasteful, somehow.”

“And how do you know that?” she demanded, glaring at him. “How do you know that there is cover over there?” she demanded, rooted in place. “Do you know these parts, or did you scry it with your lack of magical training?”

He saw that she was going to have answers before she moved again. What a shame he didn’t have any. One last, quick look around and he gave her his attention. Her gaze grew darker, her face drawn into a sharp frown. “There,” she spat. “For a start, tell me about that!”

“About what?” he was puzzled.

“What you just did” she specified.

He shrugged. “I just looked around. How is that–? ”

“You told me you hadn’t any training!”

He held up forestalling hands. “No, I didn’t. I told you I hadn’t any magical training.”

“I could feel you open your inner eye!” she hissed. “Do you have any idea what that means?”

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He shook his head. “Not any.”

Her eyes widened. “Do you think me fool enough to believe such?”

“You asked—”

Her face hardened into flat lines. “T’was not a true question, but for emphasis,” she hissed. “You must know what it means, else you’d not have been able to do it!”

He shook his head slowly. “I don’t know what it means, nor do I know what you think I did. Alright, so I opened my inner eye. You told me yourself to do that, and it didn’t surprise you much when I was able to do it then.”

“That wasn’t the same,” she shook her head. “I told you to open it, I didn’t train you to use it!”

“What’s the difference?” he wondered. “I just worked it out on my own.”

She gaped. “Worked it out—?” She paused to gather herself, clearly and openly angry now. “A babe could be shown to open its inner eye and giggle at the pretty colors, and gain no more use of the ability than that. But to use the inner eye....

Listen to me, oh man," she grated. "I am considered perhaps the greatest living mage among the children of men. I could teach a mundane to use his inner eye for simple tasks in perhaps four or five turns. An avid pupil, I could teach in perhaps two or three. A prodigy might pick it up in one and a half, certainly no less.

"And that’s only the simple tasks” she glared. “For the greater, you might multiply those times tenfold. And who’s been teaching you?”

He squinted down at her, trying to gather the intent of the question. “Well, nobody taught me exactly. I—”

“Worked it out,” she finished for him, shaking her head ominously. “Listen to me, man... no one ‘works out’ the wizard’s sight! Nor was that alone what you were doing just then, was it?”

“I don’t know what—”

“I could look at the world all the day long with my inner eye, as could you or anyone else, and noone the wiser,” she spat. I repeat, I could feel you! What were you scrying for?”

His face reddened. While he didn’t really know how he’d been doing what he’d been doing, and while he was only just now beginning to grasp the reality of it, he had been searching. Catalog it in with all the other things he’d been doing that he couldn’t explain, even to himself. “Can we not discuss this once we’ve gained some cover?” he asked again, his eyes scanning the sky.

Shadra crossed her arms and remained rooted.

He sighed tiredly and sent Sandahl a mental c’mere, Knothead.

His two companions were still awaiting his answer when the tired stud trotted up. He turned to the horse and brought the great head to his, resting forehead to forehead companionably for a moment, transmitting calm and caring through the act. He sighed again and turned back toward the two impatient Iskans.

“What does that look like to you?” he asked, indicating Sandahl’s still unhealed rump.

Corwyn had seen the wound before and had even wondered aloud about it, but Shadra had heretofore not been in a position to be overly curious. She became so now. She moved to the horse and ran her hands along the circumference of the burn, not quite touching it. “When did this happen,” she asked, voice distracted.

“Couple of days before we found you.”

“A couple of days...?” She turned from the horse, looking strangely at him. “The burn reeks of magic still. Moreover, it’s a magic I cannot place. Where have you managed to find a magic that I cannot place?"

Nodding, Storm shrugged the shoulder of the Turaleean tunic he still wore clear of his own burned shoulder and turned so she could see the wound there. Shadra’s eyes went wide. “How can you still be burned? You....”

He shrugged the tunic back up. “Yes, I got caught in the backwash of what happened to you. I feel better than I have in years, physically. Now look at the burns with your other eye.”

Without preamble, she closed her eyes and lowered her head. Then she reeled back, eyes snapping open, haunted. “Why did I not see that before?” she demanded.

He shrugged. “You’re asking me? I don’t even know how this crap works!”

“What?” Corwyn demanded, frustrated at being left in the dark.

“It still burns!” Shadra snapped. In the ethereal, the wound still burns!” Spinning back towards Sandahl, she closed her eyes again. Yes, her inner eye confirmed, flames still danced around the distinctly non-equine form of the big stud. And that question, too, would be answered before she was done. Spinning back, she narrowed her eyes. “What does that, oh man? What thing is it that burns in both worlds that I have never seen in two centuries and more of study?”

“Dragonfire,” he let her have it between those narrowed eyes.

She gasped, and Corwyn staggered, making holy signs, both jerking their heads involuntarily skyward, which was apparently the universal response to the mention of dragons on the second world.

“You fought a dragon?” she was astonished.

“We ran like frightened schoolgirls from a dragon,” he corrected. “Although not soon enough nor, apparently, quickly enough.”

“And yet you managed to escape,” she pointed out unnecessarily, not quite believing the tale even with the evidence there before her. And then the lights came on. “And now you scry for its return!”

Another shrug. “They sent it after me once. Perhaps they feel it deserves another chance.”

“They sent?”

He nodded. “So the evidence suggests.”

“They who, if I might ask.”

He raised his eyes to gaze past her, northward. “The King of Turalee, I expect, or somebody who works for him. He’s been sending things to kill me practically since I appeared on the second world. Could we, perhaps, go now?”

Alright, Shadra thought to herself as the gravity of that last, casual statement settled about her shoulders like a falling mountain, there’s a thing that bears further pursuit. But where did she start? Each statement the man uttered so casually served only to make her feel more like a mundane at a conclave of higher orders.

She was, by all accounts, the most powerful practitioner of magic alive in the known world, and yet he carelessly brandished powers she couldn’t hope to match, and with neither equipment nor components, nor, he insisted, training. His horse was no horse, he was no man, and she was more confused than ever she’d been since she first learned the difference between girls and boys.

“I felt no magic from you as we ran,” she assayed finally. “Or, at any rate, none other than your scrying.”

“Alright,” his answer was cautious.

“So how did you manage it?”

His blank look was the answer, though not the one she’d wanted or expected.

“How did you manage the run without magic?” she pressed.

“I don’t understand,” he shook his head slowly. “Why should we have needed magic to run the horses?”

The statement took a moment for her to digest. Even Corwyn looked confused by it. It was almost as if the big man were two separate people; the one standing there before her now, seemingly a normal man in spite of the strange face, and the other, who performed great magicks casually and without apparent effort.

“Well, no,” Shadra’s voice, when at last she’d found it, dripped sarcasm. “I don’t suppose where you come from magic is all that necessary when you run horses three days travel in as many span. But here, in the heart of the known world, travel at such a pace requires a certain... push... not supplied by grain nor muscle.”

“And yet,” he dodged, “I can’t get you moved half a stad over open prairie to a safer place to hold this discussion with any sort of speed.”

She stared daggers at him for a few breaths before harrumphing angrily and setting out in the direction from which the strange horse had come. The sheer weight of the answers she required beggared any ability to acquire them any time soon, and he was right in worrying about standing about in the open.

Storm set out in her wake, Sandahl falling in beside him, Corwyn bringing up the rear. Three days travel in three span? he thought at the stud.

Sandahl responded with the looming image of great, leathery wings. A shiver ran through the great body and the stud turned his head northward.

Up ahead, Shadra staggered and spun about, glaring at the man for an instant before realizing her error. “And what in the nine hells is that? She demanded, voice shrill, finger dagger-pointing at the palomino stud. “If that thing is a horse, I’m a doe-eyed virgin!”

“Well, technically,” Storm started.

“Do not even attempt that jest!” she hissed, temper near to shreds. “No horse was ever sired who possessed an inner eye, let alone could be taught to use one!” her eyes went wider and she stood straight. “And the run?”

Sandahl turned back from his perusal of the north, snorted and tossed his head.

“I told him to find us cover from the sky,” Storm told her. “I guess he figured I also wanted it quickly.” He, too, resumed his journey toward the stream.

“So you do speak to him,” she accused as he passed her. “He’s a familiar, then,” she called out, following at last. “What sort of creature is he then?”