Author's Note: Well, here is the foretold Jareth POV chapter. I'm really, really nervous about this one, you guys. (My coauthor says I'm a chickenshit and I should stop worrying.) Jareth is so complicated in some ways, and so brutally simple in others. I really hope I've captured his point of view here.

Sarah's wrath followed him like a cloud of angry bees, but Jareth ignored the sting of her words. She had been deaf to his entreaties once, he could close off her anger as well.

Or so he told himself. A link had been forged by her time in the Labyrinth—no, to be precise, a link had been forged when she broke his power and a crystal shattered on her outstretched fingertips. (Did she ever ask herself why she'd reached for it, at the end, after fighting against everything he offered her for so long? Jareth doubted that.)

Because of that link between them, he knew when she spoke of him, as now when she cursed his name with a depth and breadth of profanity he'd not suspected was in her vocabulary, and some of which was anatomically impossible.

The link was also the reason he'd been aware of her dreams. He could not let her forget about them, much as she seemed to want to suppress the memories. In Sarah's dreams, she came to him, and the sooner she remembered that, the better.

Returning to the castle, Jareth paused on the threshold of his throne room. The girl who'd been the catalyst for all of this was merrily playing with an assortment of goblins, and her laughter rang out in the cold, musty room as little else had over the years. Jareth paused a moment to watch her; the game seemed somewhere between tag and hide and seek, involving a lot of running around and jumping out at one another. The goblins were delighted, cavorting grotesquely for the child's entertainment.

If he went in, he would only disrupt the game. Normally his subjects would be aware of his presence immediately, but they were too absorbed in their play to notice, and that disrespect would have to be punished if he made his presence known. So Jareth turned aside, stopping by the kitchens before heading down a winding stair.

He had to pass through three doors, all of them bound by locks both mundane and magical, before finally arriving in the dungeons. Most of the cells here were made of cold, hard stone, and bound by iron that few fae could touch. Even Jareth himself couldn't touch the bars or locks for more than a moment, and that with gloved hands.

The goblins could, though, and he'd warded the entrances against them. It would be too easy for the three—well, four, depending on how one counted—prisoners to confuse his subjects into releasing them. And he had put too much preparation into this to let them out now.

One cell in particular, larger than the others, had iron bars across the walls, floor, and ceiling, which served to hold the stone in place. For the comfort of those held inside, the cell was clad again in wood, insulating them from the iron which was there to prevent both their escape, and any magic being worked on the stone. He'd never had to confine a night troll before this, and their rock-calling powers were not something he wished to have loose in a castle made of stone.

Had it been any other prisoners, he would have contented himself with straw on the floor for a bed, a bowl for gruel, and a bucket for necessities. For these, he'd equipped the cell as if it were guest quarters, with cots, basins for washing, a table and benches, even a privy. They had three meals a day, with proper plates and cutlery, and he had made certain they were unmolested by his guards.

The three were, predictably, ungrateful.

"I demand to be released!" the fox-knight shouted shrilly, as he had every single time Jareth came down here. "Sire, this captivity is most dishonorable! As a knight of the realm, I should at least be afforded a chance at trial by combat!"

"Shut up!" the dwarf hissed. "You don't want to make him mad!"

"Ludo sad," the night troll mourned.

Only the dog was silent. Jareth suspected that one found captivity preferable to its master's endless battles.

Sir Didymus shrilled, "I demand to know on what grounds I've been imprisoned!"

That was new, and Jareth answered it. "You are not imprisoned," he replied, and that silenced them all, four pairs of quizzical eyes looking through the barred door at him. "Gentlemen, you are in protective custody." That was a phrase he'd borrowed from Aboveground, learned watching over Sarah, and it was particularly useful in this situation.

The fox-knight was clearly as befuddled by that as the night troll. The dwarf, of course, scoffed. Hoggle could always be relied on to choose the most pessimistic outlook. "Yeah, right. Protected from what?"

"From the Labyrinth," Jareth informed them. That earned him almost a full minute of contemplative silence. He needed them compliant, if this was to work.

"Sire, we live in the Labyrinth," Sir Didymus pleaded. "There is no need to protect us from our own home."

"The runner challenging it today has a very literal mind," Jareth said, strolling close to the bars. Not quite within Ludo's reach, though. "The traps are quite banal, and quite fatal. I fear this runner's belief in magic is almost extinguished."

"How'd someone who doesn't believe in magic even get here in the first place?" Hoggle asked.

"I said, almost extinguished," Jareth corrected. Suddenly tiring of the charade, he continued almost casually, "Your 'friend' Sarah still believes in this place, despite trying to convince herself otherwise."

All four of them perked up, three voices murmuring her name in tones of surprise and wonder—and one happy bark that probably amounted to the same.

The night troll spoke again, while the others were still awestruck. "Sarah … grown up?"

"Quite correct, brother," the fox-knight said as it dawned on him as well. "Why, Sarah must be … no. It would be quite impossible."

"Is this some kinda trick?" the dwarf demanded.

All of them were aware of the same cold truth that had kept Jareth awake through long nights, before he'd finally damned it all and moved that book into her young charge's path. The world Aboveground had moved into an age where, barring a few eccentrics, adults no longer believed in magic. The fae realms had always taken children and adolescents by preference, young minds adapting more easily to the Underground, but in centuries past adult humans had believed in faeries.

No, it was stronger than belief. They had known of faeries, enough to leave a dish of milk by the door for brownies and sprites, enough to fear the fairy-rings and beware of dark pools in the deep forest. Humans now dismissed it all as folklore, stories for children, and the fae on the whole welcomed that. There was too much iron and steel in the human realm, too much concrete and glass and plastic. Too few glens and moors left where one couldn't hear traffic or smell smog. The Information Age had followed the Industrial Age, relentlessly crushing the belief in magic, and now Aboveground was no place for his kind.

They could still reach children, and adolescents, and a few young adults who hadn't had the wonder bled out of them by banal 'reality'. But anyone with more than a score of years was a risk. And a grown woman, Sarah's age? Perhaps another king might try it, if he were as mercilessly goaded as Jareth. But no other king had Umardelin—the realm of the Labyrinth—to rule.

The Labyrinth was old magic, older even than most of the Fae. It was a test, a challenge, and it shaped itself to each runner who dared it. Its magic did not always answer to the will of its king, as most realms did. And now, because he had arranged it so, the Labyrinth ordered itself according to Sarah Williams' fragile belief.

"It is no trick," Jareth said, quietly.

"Sire, we must go to her," Sir Didymus pleaded. "Lady Sarah is in grave danger."

"Do you think I do not know that?" he snapped, and controlled his temper only by the thinnest margin. "You, too, would be in grave danger if I released you."

"I am a knight of the realm, sire!" the fox-knight burst out. "Danger is my bailiwick!"

"And if you came within range of her, Sarah's mind would turn you into a mere dog, a yapping terrier with less sense than your Ambrosius," Jareth spat back. The little fox-knight was clearly taken aback by that, as by no other challenge in his history. "To say nothing of what she might do to Hoggle and Ludo, all unknowing. The world she lives in now has no place for any of you."

"Release us, Sire," Sir Didymus said, shaken but valiant as ever. "Even as a mute beast, I might afford her some protection. If the Labyrinth has turned deadly, she should have all her friends about her, no matter what it costs us."

"Sarah friend," the night troll said, as if that was all that needed saying. Perhaps, for Ludo, it was. Even Hoggle moved toward the door.

Jareth felt an unfamiliar twinge of compassion for them all. Envy threatened to sweep it aside; Sarah would have believed in their friendship, instantly and fearlessly, as she did not believe him. Ludo was a troll, the dwarf had betrayed her, but if she could be made to see them as real once again, she would have hugged them and wept for joy.

"I cannot," Jareth told them. "I have promised Sarah I would not allow you to be harmed. She has a decade of unbelief for the Labyrinth to sand away. Let it do its work, and let me see to her safety. I am the king." He, at least, had will and magic enough to fight his own realm's attempts to cast him as the villain.

On that note, he slid their dinners through the small opening in the door, and left before they could think to ask him just why he'd summoned Sarah back. That, he could not answer. Not to them.

Jareth could guess what Sarah thought was his motivation. To win over the one who'd beaten him so soundly. Yes, there was that, and victory now would be sweet indeed. That she suspected the conquest would be sexual did not surprise him, nor was it entirely untrue. He would very much like to soften the stubborn line of her jaw and darken those steely green eyes with desire.

There were truths beyond truths, however, and the deeper truth to that lust was simply that he had been unable to forget her. The gods knew Jareth had tried—and had had help in the effort, particularly after she had shut him out of even her dreams. Yet every attempt to drive her from his own mind had failed spectacularly. From the moment Sarah shattered the enchanted ballroom and proceeded to lay waste to his kingdom, she had haunted him.

Now, at long last, there was a chance to exorcise her, one way or another. Through dangers untold and hardships unnumbered—for both of them—perhaps he might at last lay the ghosts of the past to rest. He had to play it carefully, though. For that reason, he kept magicking himself out of range before she could unleash that temper of hers on him and start a war between them that would end with all of Umardelin in ashes. If he could make her think, stop fighting him for a moment and actually think about everything between them, perhaps there was a chance.

If Sarah didn't get herself or him killed in the process.