She stepped through, the three cats winding about her ankles like some benign variation of the Nightmare Grass. She stood in the back room of her whole, clean, true house in the Hidden Land, and knew that someone had been here. Someone, said the voices, fading, has been sitting in my chair.

The cats, pleased to be home, purred thunderously. She could still feel the summons. It had no physical power, but it called monotonously, like a cat in a locked room. It came to Claudia that it might benefit her to know where her summoner, however unconscious, was. She moved in the direction of the calling voice, and peered into the little diamond pane toward which it guided her. The stuff of the pane wavered like water. She saw the false Laura just putting the flute away beneath the huge trees of the Enchanted Forest. But she saw also, fading in and out like an agitated water-beast, the counterfeit Lady Ruth in the parlor of this very house, under the ceiling painted with goldenrod, playing a mundane flute. Andrew was tardy; or disobedient; or likeliest of all, cautious. She snatched at the poem as it ran between the shivering lines of the two scenes she saw, snapped it off short, and let the greater part of it fall back into the house.

It spoke tunefully out of the sunny air of her porch, in the mingled voices of Randolph and Andrew and others she did not know. She heard it through and laughed. Andrew had not been disobedient, nor very cautious. His abominable rhymes had let her catch the song and turn it aside.

She took her hand from the window, which settled into the scene of the Enchanted Forest. Claudia looked at it, and frowned. “Past,” she said, “passing, or to come?”

She went quickly into the kitchen. The sink was full of scraped dishes, and a smell lingered of garlic and tomatoes.

“Past,” said Claudia. “Belaparthalion.”

She ran across her front hall and took the steps two at a time, not because she thought she could do anything but because she was too curious to go slowly. The cats bounded after her; this was a game they liked. One last lone voice said thoughtfully, With help of her most potent ministers, / And in her most unmitigable rage.

They had spoken to Belaparthalion, but they had not released him. She strode around to lean on the window, and addressed his remote, red, whiskered face. “Didst thou not fix them with thy glittering eye?” she said.

The englobed dragon was like a carved and enameled piece of jewelry. The light of the globe was as gray as the moon. She waited, and slowly the golden color flooded back, and the dragon closed its red-and-black striped lids, opened them again, and smiled. “Did thy sojourn like thee,” he said, “in thy old house?”

“Liketh thine thee, in thy new house with my sputtering beasts?”

“We’re well enough,” he said.

“Is thy power so minished that thou couldst not bring thy minions to release thee?”

“My power is so well kept,” said he, “that I did persuade them from that rescue. I know this prison cell, and I know you. I’ll come forth in my true shape, or not at all.”

“And shall Chryse come for thee?”

But he would not answer her.