raised so many doubts during his rallying-speech, was holding a torch in his free hand and peering at his face as if he did not quite believe what had just happened.
'Jules?' he gasped.
'Alex?' said Julian. 'My God, man, you've saved us, you and that weird army of yours — '
'Army? What — '
'Let me take him, friend Julian,' rumbled a deep voice, like thunder on the mountains.
Then he was scooped up, as a gentle child would scoop up a toy, and he was staring into the face of the sheepherding giant. 'Champion,' the giant said, slowly and carefully. 'Where is the Godmother? When last we heard, she was in the guise of a squire, going in through the Princess's tower. But we cannot find her.'
'I don't know,' he replied, gathering his wits about him. 'I — '
It was his name, in a long, feline wail, like a cat calling her kittens.
He located where it was coming from; the top window of the tower nearest him.
'Take me to that window! Please!' he shouted to the giant, who obligingly stretched out his arm.
There was a small, black shape in the black of the open window. A cat.
'That's me!' he called to her. 'I am Alexander.'
'Hold still!' he shouted to the giant. 'I think a cat — '
A cat flew out of the darkness to land on his chest and slide off the slick surface of the armor into the palm of the giant's hand. She spat and cursed at them both for being fools.
'I'll put you both down, then?' said the giant, hastily, and he carefully lowered Alexander and the cat back down beside Julian. By that time, Alexander had picked up the cat and was cradling her as carefully as his armor would allow. Her claws slipped and scratched on the metal of his armor, and she mewed her irritation until he managed to place her on the stones again at his feet.
She ran off; he ran after her, pausing only long enough to snatch a black sword out of the hand of the dead man who had been holding it.
The cat kept glancing back at him over her shoulder to make sure that he was following. There were still knots of fighting men and monsters in the rooms that he passed; he and the cat dodged around them. They emerged into an enormous room that held more fighting; a few of Julian's men with enchanted boar-spears, but also three Unicorns, an armored Elf in elaborate armor, and a bleeding, enraged Gryphon, all fighting hideous spider-men that glittered blackly as they moved and shed black blood from their wounds.
The cat rushed past them. He followed.
And stopped dead in the final doorway.
It wasn't the piles of gold and gems that arrested his attention, although that might have, under any other circumstances. It was the terrifying black spider thing bending over Elena's unconscious body.
He had thought that he had no strength left. He had been wrong.
Terrible strength and energy coursed though him, as if he had been struck by a bolt of lightning that had energized him instead of killing him.
The creature was only just starting to turn as he leaped upon it with a scream, sword in both hands, attacking like a mad dancer, a threshing-fiend, a man-machine of death.
His first blow sliced the thing's right arm off. His second took the left, and the third cut the head cleanly from the body, sending it to the top of one of the piles of treasure where it remained, eerily staring out into the room with its sightless, unblinking black eyes.
Its body fell over sideways as all four legs collapsed beneath it.
He did not even look; he threw his sword aside, staggered to Elena, fell to his knees beside her, and saw with a relief so intense that it made him weep that she was still breathing and outwardly unhurt.
And that was all he knew from that moment until the moment when Julian and some of the strange army of magical creatures found him again, lying beside her, holding her hand in his, the cat standing over both of them, hissing, as if she was guarding her kittens.
Elena tried to keep herself calm as she sat in the hall outside the library of the Keep on Glass Mountain. No matter
