Rebecca, wo du auch immer bist (Rebecca, wherever you are)

Dein Herz ist ruhlos, wie die wilde, freie See (Your heart is restless like the wild, free sea)

Wenn der Abend beginnt, singt der Wind (When the evening begins the wind sings)

Rebecca, komm heim, Rebecca! (Rebecca, come home, Rebecca!)

Aus dem Nebelreich zurück nach Manderley (From the foggy realm return to Manderley)

-- Rebecca das Musical, Rebecca

A child's high-pitched laugh rang out. Abi opened her eyes to find herself lying amidst long grass. She propped herself up on her elbows. Absently she noticed that the weight of her body left no impression on the grass.

It took her eyes a while to decipher the vivid colours around her. Funny; she didn't remember the real world being so bright. She was in the grounds of a large castle. Just ahead of her was a bed full of flowers just beginning to wither. On the other side of the flower-bed was a cobblestone driveway. Two small children, a blond boy and a brunette girl, kicked a ball back and forth across it.

Another young boy sat on the grass a short distance from Abi. His face was a curious mixture of sullenness and wistfulness as he watched the other two play.

Where am I? Abi wondered.

The children were the only people around to ask. And the youngest boy was the only one not absorbed in the game.

"Excuse me," she began, and prepared for him to panic. "Can you tell me where I am?"

The boy ignored her. She repeated herself in a louder voice. He continued to ignore her. How rude! Annoyed, she tried to shake his shoulder. Her hand went right through him as if he wasn't there.

A woman spoke behind them. "Raitálen!"

Abi and the boy looked round. A tall, thin woman in a brilliant green dress frowned down at the boy. There was something faintly familiar about the woman's face. She would have been beautiful if she hadn't looked as if she had a lot of worries. Her fine silk dress and carefully-styled hair suggested she was someone very important. Yet her face had the suggestion of a shadow over it. For some reason she couldn't explain Abi felt sure this woman was unhappy.

She held out her hand. The boy scrambled to his feet and took it.

"I've told you to leave them alone," the woman said with a dark look towards the children.

That look sent a chill of foreboding down Abi's spine. Something was badly wrong here.

"But I want to play with them, Mother," Raitálen protested. "They're my siblings."

The woman's dark look became positively murderous. She forced a smile as she looked down at her son. "They aren't your siblings, dear. They're just bastards. You are your father's only true heir. You mustn't play with such trash or their taint will rub off on you."

She led the boy away. Abi stared after them, shaken. The world's brilliant colours seemed to have suddenly faded.

I don't understand, she thought. What is this? Why am I here?

The faint echo of Ilaran's soul still lingered around this place. She followed it slowly. The world blurred around her. When it became clear again she found herself in a courtyard. A boy of about Shizuki's age had a bird perched on his wrist. Well, "perched" was stretching it. The bird was almost as large as he was. Abi had never seen falconry in person before. It wasn't practised in Seroyawa. But she recognised what he was doing at once from pictures she'd seen in books.

Softly the boy murmured something in the bird's ear. He threw his arm up. The bird spread its wings and soared into the sky. He stared after it until it was out of sight.

Footsteps approached from behind. His shoulders tensed but he didn't look round. Abi did. At first she didn't believe her eyes.

"Ilaran?"

She realised her mistake immediately. Whoever this man was, he was blond and brown-eyed. Ilaran was a green-eyed brunet -- unless he'd dyed his hair and found some way to change his eye colour. Ilaran was also considerably taller and thinner than this man, whose head was barely on a level with Abi's shoulder and who was what might charitably be called somewhat overweight. Even so the resemblance was eerie.

Not-Ilaran stared at the boy with a cruel sneer. "What are you doing, Raitálen?"

The boy turned slowly. He gave the man a withering look that was both out-of-place on someone so young and yet very familiar. For the first time Abi looked, really looked, at his dark brown hair, poison-green eyes, and unamused frown. In that moment he looked exactly like a miniature version of Ilaran. She didn't know whether to laugh or cry.

In the end she settled for shaking her head in disbelief. "Is this what they mean by your life flashing before your eyes? Only this time it's someone else's life. What a mess!"

Now that she knew she was somehow reliving Ilaran's life she felt very uncomfortable about seeing any more. It was worse than reading someone else's diary. She wouldn't like a stranger watching her life unfold. Ilaran would be rightly furious if he knew. Worst of all, now she knew his kelros-name. She had no right to that knowledge.

She tried to sidle away unobserved -- a waste of time for an invisible spectator. She had no need to tiptoe when no one could see or hear her, but she did it anyway.

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A sharp slap echoed around the courtyard. Abi looked back in spite of herself. Raitálen or Ilaran or whatever his name currently was held his hand against the side of his face -- including over his eye, she noticed in shock. The man shook his own hand. Judging by the look on his face the blow had hurt him as much as its victim.

Quite a crowd had gathered behind him by this time. Most of them wore rich fabrics and garish colours that immediately marked them as having too much money and not enough taste. Others wore servants' uniforms. At the front of the crowd Abi spotted the woman from earlier. She watched the scene with a savage scowl. It was easy to deduce her relationship to Ilaran -- and thus to the man who had struck him. So this was Princess Aderthril. She was relatively young and seemed healthy, if unhappy; why had she died so early? Abi tried to do some mental maths and work out how much longer Aderthril had to live. She failed. Maths had never been her best subject, and she didn't know what year this was.

Ilaran's father patted him on the head as if he was a toddler. Ilaran looked as if he'd like to bite his hand off.

"Tell us all why you let my prize hawk free, Raitálen," the man said in a patronising voice.

Ilaran stood up straight and glared at the crowd with all the imperious dignity that could be managed by a boy of scarcely five hundred. "It's not right to keep him in a cage. He's meant to be free."

A chorus of derisive giggles erupted from the crowd. Only Aderthril didn't smile. She looked at her son with a strange mixture of anger and dismay. Ilaran's father sneered. He whistled twice and held out his arm. A dark shape barrelled down from the sky. Abi ducked instinctively. When she looked up she saw the hawk perched on the man's wrist. He stroked its head with much more gentleness than he'd shown towards his son.

"You see, Raitálen," he said in an incongruously fatherly tone, "he's tame. You can set him free a hundred times but he'll always come back when I call him." He gave Ilaran a cold smile. "Still, we can't expect you to understand such things. You're just a half-breed. Your mother has taught you too many of her barbarian ways." He gave Aderthril a poisonous look. She returned it with interest. To Ilaran he continued, "You must learn better. Else you'll never be worthy of inheriting my throne."

Ilaran said nothing. Abi looked at him and was shocked to see tears in his eyes.

Resolutely she turned away. She followed the path out of the courtyard. Again the world blurred around her. She walked for what felt like an hour, reluctant to stop. Eventually her feet were too sore for her to continue. She had to stop.

Once again the world cleared. This time she found herself in a crowded banquet hall. Ilaran's father sat at the head of the table. Beside him, where protocol dictated his wife should sit, was a young blonde woman. On her side, where his heir should sit, was a young boy of scarcely one hundred.

Abi looked around for Ilaran or Aderthril. There was no sign of Aderthril anywhere. To her surprise she saw Ilaran sitting near the very bottom of the table. He was at least a century older than he had been when she last saw him. His face, formerly round and chubby like all young children's, was already hardening into the sharp, pointed features he had as an adult. He picked up his cup with the awkward carefulness of a young adult who was going through a growth spurt and was still not used to how long his arms were now.

That part of the table was reserved for servants. Seating a royal there was a grave insult. It had even been the cause of wars.

Abi looked back at Ilaran's father. Her lips thinned. It was lucky for him she was currently intangible. Otherwise she would have boxed his ears.

Beside him the little boy coughed. His mother stopped eating and patted him on the back. It didn't help. He coughed again and again. Each time was more violent than the last.

A sickening sense of dread pooled in Abi's stomach. Perhaps he'd just swallowed wrong. Maybe he was coming down with a cold. Colds could make children cough, couldn't they? He was so young. Scarcely more than a baby. No one would--

She looked back at Ilaran. The little boy continued to cough. Everyone at the table forgot about their meal to watch the unfolding scene. Ilaran set down his knife and fork. He watched with an impassive expression. Calmly he picked up his glass and sipped his drink with the unconcerned air of a spectator at a play.

Tananerl didn't have a taboo against killing children.

Ilaran's own words echoed in her mind. ...it wasn't killing a baby. It was revenge by proxy, killing someone associated with an enemy.

Abi grabbed the back of an empty chair to steady herself. Surprisingly she was able to touch it instead of her hands passing through it again. She would have been more curious about why that was if a child wasn't dying before her eyes.

Mayhem reigned at the top of the table. The child had been laid on the floor. A doctor knelt over it, with a priest muttering prayers behind him. The child's mother sobbed quietly as she clutched his hand. Ilaran's father looked on with a gobsmacked expression, as if it hadn't yet dawned on him what was happening.

Ilaran finished his drink. He stood up and slipped out while everyone else was distracted. Abi watched him go. In the background the child's coughs stopped. The silence that followed was more chilling than the coughing itself.

Abi followed Ilaran out of the banquet hall. She trailed behind him all the way to a deserted hallway. Aderthril sat on a bench beneath a bay window. When she heard him approach she looked up.

"It's done," Ilaran said.

His voice was still high like a child's, nothing like his deep voice as an adult. In his clumsy movements there was no trace of the poise and elegance he would develop later in life. Once again Abi realised just how young he still was. She tried to reconcile that with his indifference to what had just happened. How could someone so young care so little about their half-sibling's murder?

"Good," Aderthril said. "Now come on. We haven't much time before they realise we've gone."

She swept down the hall. Ilaran trailed after her, struggling to keep up. Abi watched until they turned a corner and disappeared from view.

This is the man you're trying to save, a little voice whispered in her mind. Is he worth it? Is atoning for your mistakes really a good enough reason to bring him back?

"He's still just a child," Abi said. Even to herself it didn't sound convincing. "He isn't like this as an adult."

Isn't he? What do you really know about him except what you're seeing now?

She didn't have an answer for that. So she ignored the voice and followed the path away from this scene. Once again the world blurred around her.

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In Death's throne room the chess game was not going well. Ilaran had already lost five pawns, a bishop, and a knight. He hadn't captured so much as one of Death's pieces.

She shook her head as she captured another pawn. "You really are bad at this game."

Ilaran was spared the trouble of replying when without warning he developed a bizarre case of double vision. The chess board was still in front of him, and he could still see Death sitting on the other side, but superimposed over his surroundings was the image of a little girl dropping a caterpillar on a woman's head.

He blinked and rubbed his eyes. The inexplicable image disappeared.

"What in the world was that?"

For a minute Death looked as bemused as he was. Then light dawned. "Ah. She's travelling through your memories. As a side-effect you now have access to some of her memories."

Ilaran stared at her in horror. "But I don't want Abihira's memories! It's... it's rude to poke around in someone else's mind!"

"Yes, but that's what she's currently doing. Not willingly, but still. Consider it a sort of justice."

That was not nearly as comforting as she seemed to think.