Guide twitched and shivered, pushing the confused memory away, and huddled deeper into his coat, chilled. The sun must have gone behind a cloud. He had only closed his eyes for a second, propped against the warm rock at the base of the cliff – just for a second, to rest them from the tormenting glare of white sand, white rock, white sky. Now he opened them gritty from sleep to find himself in darkness. The hissing roar of Sanctuary's mind ebbed and swelled still, and it was a long dazed moment before he realised that the sound was not in his head.

The sea. They had left him beside the sea.

A rolling hiss, and cold water slopped over his outstretched legs. He scrambled to his feet, gasping at the shock of cold, and scrubbed at his eyes with his off hand, blinking vainly to try to clear his vision.

The moon was a thumbprint smudge of white, much higher in the sky than when he had seen it earlier. The sea loomed, dark on blacker dark, whispering and hissing, only the faint streaks and fret of phosphorescence giving him a ghostly, ominous sense of its presence. Another rasp and rush of white foam over pebbles and sand, and this time the water swelled and licked almost to his knees, dragging him off-balance. Guide growled a curse. He must have slept for hours, stupefied by the heat like a lizard on a rock, and now the tide had turned. If he wasn't quick, he would be cut off from the ruins where he had sheltered for the past two nights, and he still had to wade through the stream that cut across the beach from the waterfall. If only he could get there before the incoming tide made it too deep...

He waited for a moment while the wave receded, then splashed across the jumble of rocks to the south as quickly as he could in the dark, clambering and slipping, heart pounding, heedless of scraped hands and bruised knees. Twice the water twined around him, lifted his body like flotsam despite his clutching claws, and he scrambled higher, the breath rasping in his throat, the same thin thrill of fear stabbing through him as he had felt when he struggled to fend off the mind of the Queen: the same dawning awareness of enormous power, capriciously witheld but poised to crush him on a whim.

Guide snarled, his claws scritching as he sought desperately for a handhold on the wet rock. He was almost to the edge of the rocky outcropping now, could see the pale sweep of the huge bay flung away to the south like a sleeper's arm, and he hastened his steps, taking risks jumping from rock to rock, all his attention fixed on reaching the safety of the sand. He recognised the odd, sweetish scent of the water from the falls that must by now be mixing with the incoming waves, and wondered for a second, uneasily, what the smell was. He had been so intent on his need to feed when he waded across the rusty-looking swathe earlier, he had ignored it, though he had noticed the faint chemical stink of it on the skirts of his coat when he stripped it off to pursue that ridiculous crustacean.

He was never sure, afterwards, whether he was distracted into carelessness by the memory of that hallucinatory hour hanging over the rockpool, or whether weakness made him clumsy, but as he jumped for the last outcrop, his heel slipped on the weed-slick rock and he fell awkwardly against the side of gully. There was a blank, sick second of impact and he knew he had struck his head. For a dizzy, empty space he drifted, unable to grasp any sense of up or down, or where he might be in relation to it.

Pain rushed back with awareness. He was sprawled face-down in wet sand, and the back of his head hurt with a spiky insistence that he knew meant something serious. Dark down here. Wet sand under his hands, in his mouth. He lifted his head slightly and coughed, spat a dribble of gritty saliva that tasted of blood. Wet sand. But the sand had been dry... He blinked and levered himself up on one elbow, fumbling after the significance of the thought. Get up. But his right leg was twisted beneath him and when he tried to move it, he screamed and fell back on to the sand, panting and snarling, heartbeat hammering in his ears. Chills chased one another across his skin, and there was a strange faraway rushing sound in his skull, like static from a badly-tuned radio signal.

He dug clawed fingers into the soft sand and dragged himself forwards a few inches, unable to muffle the ragged noises the pain forced from him, rested a second and then did it again before he lost his courage. And again, face contorted into a mask, teeth clenched. Because his world was filling up with the hiss and roar of static, louder every second, and this time he knew it was the water seething up the narrow gully to claim him.

In the last moment, when he was tumbled over and over in the swell, blinded, salt water in his mouth and nose, salt water blocking his ears and stinging in sense pits and handmouth, Guide felt oddly peaceful. He was going to die, drowned or broken against the cliff face, he couldn't feel that it mattered which. All that mattered was that she had failed, and he had kept his long-ago promise to Snow: You are my one true queen, now and forever. His mind filled with the sound of her low laughter, the tickle of her warm breath beside his ear as she whispered, "And how will you keep such a promise, my brave Guide, when another Queen bids you come to her? How will you hide then?"

The memory swallowed him whole, and he lay beside her in the warm nest of her sleeping nook, limbs entangled, the silky fall of her scarlet hair brushing his chest, her long amber eyes half teasing him with the question.

*I will lie.*

*You cannot lie to a queen.* Indulgent assurance in the touch of her thoughts. She rolled a strand of his pale hair between her long fingers, using the tip like a pen to trace the line of the star tattoo that surrounded his left eye, and he twitched and shivered, caught in her gaze unable to look away. *You see? We are too strong for you men, my sisters and I.* But she had demonstrated both love and strength that night in ardour fiercer than he had ever sensed from her before, taking and giving until they were both spent in exhaustion. He had never reiterated the promise, and Snow never spoke of it again.

*You cannot lie to a queen.* And yet he had done it, not once but many, many times in the aching years of vengeance after she fell. He had been faithful to her, and he took the blood-bright memory of her scarlet hair down with him into the dark.