They met for breakfast the next morning at a café amongst the beachfront shops, and they talked for a long while, partly with the ease of strangers to whom it can be simpler to confide secrets, partly with the familiarity of old friends.

In the quiet warmth Will had pushed back the sleeves of the jumper he was wearing. As he reached for the sugar Jane caught sight of the burn on the underside of his arm; a circle, quartered by a cross.

'That's a nasty burn you've had,' she said in concern, stretching out one finger to touch it.

'Yes, it was,' Will said. His first instinct was to roll the sleeve down and cover up the sign of fire that had been burned into him when he was new in his power, tested by the Dark and almost broken; but he hesitated, and instead offered his usual explanation: 'Metalworking accident…'

But Jane was staring at the mark, not listening. With an effort, as if struggling to remember something, she said, 'Will… I've seen this before…'

'Well, of course,' he replied with a casual shrug. 'It happened when I was about eleven years old – you would have seen it when we were all on the beach in Cornwall.'

'No-' Jane shook her head. 'That's not what I meant. I've seen this sign, in so many places when I was travelling, or I thought I saw it but when I looked closer there wasn't anything there, it was just a trick of the light or something. But it seemed so familiar, always… and now you've got it too…'

For a few moments they sat in silence; Jane's eyes were unfocussed as she strained to trace the paths of a memory long untrodden and more than half-buried. 'And this,' she said, pulling the golden strip from her pocket and placing it on the table between herself and Will, 'this means something too, the same something, they're connected. Oh, why can't I remember?' Her face creased in frustration.

Will hesitated a few moments longer, debating with himself what to do. But, he reasoned silently, Jane must be right, this must mean something, because the Wild Magic does not just return gifts that are freely given to it… perhaps, at long last, she is meant to really remember, and perhaps something more…

'Do you have a pocket mirror?' he asked. Jane stared at him as if he had gone insane. 'I'm not crazy, I just want to show you something.'

She shook her head. 'No, I never carry one…'

'That's okay. I'll use this instead.' Checking quickly to make sure that none of the few remaining people in the café were watching, Will filled his water glass to the brim and held his hand over it, murmuring some words under his breath. Jane was still staring at him. 'Here.' Will took away his hand. 'Can you see anything?'

And upon the surface of the water, unrolling before Jane like a silent film, tiny figures appeared and moved; herself and her brothers as children, and there too were a young Will, and Merriman, and a boy with white hair, each holding something that blazed in their hands, which were raised against a storm of impossible madness. It seemed black horsemen were bearing down upon them as they stood around a great tree, and the white-haired boy was swinging a sword that also blazed, struggling to cut something small and bright that hung in the branches…

Jane gave a little hiccuping gasp as the last images shivered across and were gone. The look she gave Will was different now; comprehending yet tinged with fear. Then she said, as she had said once before many long years ago, 'You are not quite like the rest of us, are you, Will Stanton?'

'No,' Will said, settling his glasses into their proper position on the bridge of his nose. 'Not quite.' He signalled to the waitress for their bill. 'Let's go for a walk and talk about it.'

.rising…..rising… .rising…..rising… .rising…..rising…

They trod slowly through the dry sand that gave only reluctantly under their feet. In the wet packed strip that ran across the edge where the waves had teased the shore there were footprints: twiglike marks of birds' toes, the occasional criss-cross of paw and foot, small spurts of sand thrown up in the wake of the run.

Jane listened in silence as Will spoke, eyes on the ground, hands curled in her pockets. The wind tried unsuccessfully to ruffle her hair, which was too short; it had more success with Will's floppy sandy fringe, which he pushed absentmindedly from his eyes as he talked, low and soft and long about the great rising of the Dark. How he himself was the last of the Old Ones to be born into the Circle, how he had sought and found six great Signs of the Light, Things of Power like the Grail that Jane and her brothers had found, along with a golden harp and a crystal sword wielded by a boy named Bran who was the son of Arthur, that great battle lord of the Light. How it had been the efforts of the three Drews, together with Will himself, Merriman, Bran and an unexpected companion named John Rowlands, which saw the silver cut from the tree at the right moment and the Dark banished out of Time, forever.

Time indeed seemed suspended as Will spoke and Jane listened. They walked to the gentle relentless swish and crash, swish and crash, of the waves on the shore. But beyond their notice a changing tide of men and women and children still ebbed and flowed about them, and the sun rose higher and burned through the clouds, and loosened the wind's chill fingers from them, and at last Will fell silent.

Jane could not help it; there were tears on her cheeks. Will put a gentle hand on her shoulder and guided her to sit on a nearby rock, plonking himself down at her feet. 'Sorry,' Jane mumbled.

Will gave her hand a reassuring squeeze. 'Hey now. Don't be. It was a lot to take in.'

Jane fumbled in her shoulder bag for a tissue and wiped her eyes. 'I suppose it was,' she conceded with a watery smile.

'You did better than most of my students,' Will told her solemnly. 'They'd have been pounding on the door to be let out halfway through a lecture like that – I didn't even have to lock you in. There, that's better,' he added as Jane laughed in spite of herself.

She shook her head. 'Oh Will – you reminded me so much of Great Uncle Merry just then.'

'Jane-' There was some concern in Will's face now. 'I can't… I can't promise that what I've told you will stay with you. You remember it now, but it might slip away again – I'm not sure exactly what's going on right now, you see. But I think I've done the right thing in telling you…'

'I hope I don't forget again… It's so strange, to think that I've been walking around with such a big chunk of my life missing and I hardly even knew it…' Jane gestured helplessly. 'And it was so – so important! The most important thing in the world and I couldn't remember it!'

'You didn't need to. Anyway, it's not the kind of thing you can go around casually throwing into conversations, is it…' Will grinned. 'Well, I certainly can't, at least.'

Jane had taken out the piece of beaten gold and was turning it over and over in her hands, feeling the smooth yet uneven surface, the indentations where the lettering was bitten into the metal. 'The Greenwitch… I remember giving this to her now, well, throwing it into the sea from those rocks. You gave it to me, instead of the bracelet or whatever it was I'd been going to use instead, and I couldn't understand how you had known to make it. Just a lucky guess, you said, or something like that…'

'And now here it is again. It does mean something, Jane, you're right about that… I just don't know what, yet.'

A sudden cold fear pooled in Jane's stomach. 'You don't think – you don't think the Dark is rising again?'

'No.' His reassurance was swift and certain. 'No, it's definitely not that kind of sign – there would be others, and anyway, it's just not possible. The Dark was cast out of Time by the power of the High Magic; there's no way for them to return. Now it's all just about the ordinary battles between goodness and wickedness, which are certainly bad enough… I wish I knew what I was supposed to do, though.' Lines creased his forehead and the corners of his eyes as he sat a few moments in thought. 'The Wild Magic just doesn't do things like this, you know… it's indifferent, it's free, it's, well, wild… and yet here it is, the gift you gave returned, in the most unlikely manner, and in the most unlikely place…'

.rising…..rising… .rising…..rising… .rising…..rising…

The telling had reawakened an old ache in Will's chest that he thought he had mastered long ago. He had always, necessarily, kept private the near-bottomless sense of loss he had felt in returning to the fully ordinary world. Grief had bored through him nonetheless, slow and thorough, until at last after months had passed he was ready to know, with the clear understanding of an Old One that was both blessing and curse, that while the pain would stay with him all his days he would in the end be whole again. It was a promise and a surety, this knowing, and Will held to it as if it were a lighthouse on a distant shore of the world, his unfailing guide home.

Now as he and Jane sat together Will let the sadness wash over him like a wave and touch the ever-present wondering at the very back of his mind… Is it time yet, is it time?...

'Are you ok, Will?'

'Hm, yes, just remembering things… I miss him, you know. Merriman. And some of the others… I'll see them again sometime, of course, but it's been a long time waiting, that's all. Anyway. Better not dwell on that, I suppose.' He forced himself back to the present, taking a handful of sand and letting it spill through his fingers, watching as the wind caught the numberless grains and sent them flying and falling in all directions. 'It's so different here, isn't it?'

'You've never been here before, have you?' Jane asked.

'No, I've not travelled much, well, not outside the UK. And here, it feels – we Old Ones, we can sense things about a place, the old magics of them, the sacred places. It's like - like looking at veins of ore in a piece of rock, I guess. Back home they're all of silver, pale and gleaming, but this country is all red gold, and copper, even here right at the side of the ocean… you can tell this land has a heart of fire…'

Suddenly his dreamy expression changed and he sat up, alert , glancing around. 'Jane! Do you hear that?' But he could tell from her blank expression that she could not hear it, that haunting fleeting cascade of notes that he knew so well but could never recall to waking memory. Will closed his eyes to focus on it better; it was pulling him, calling, he knew he had to follow it –

'This way! Come on!' He jumped to his feet and pulled Jane up too. She brushed sand from her jeans and grabbed her shoulder bag.

'Where are we going?' There was a palpable nervousness in her voice.

'No idea,' he answered cheerfully. 'We'll find out when we get there, I suppose.'