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“That’s not brandy, not in an old jar like that.” Still, he cocked his head to the side.

“I wouldn’t know brandy. This is old-time poteen.”

“And I’m the mayor of Dungarven . . .”

“As you wish it.” I pulled the cork and presented the jug.

He did not take it, not immediately.

“I bring you a gift, and you would refuse it?” I asked gently. “Surely, you would not wish to waste good spirits.” I shouldn’t have made the punnish allusion, but the overspace elementals usually don’t catch them.

“You are a hard man with words, Captain Sean Henry, but you are drowning, and drown you will.” But he took the jug, and so heavy was it that it needed both his green hands.

In the moment that he had both of them on the jug, I lunged and grabbed the cocked hat.

The jug vanished, but the hat did not, and I held it, with both hands and mind.

The green eyes glittered, with a copper-iron heaviness and malice. “Clever you are, Captain Henry, clever indeed.”

“I only ask to keep what is mine, within mine, and nothing of yours.”

“So be it.” The merrow cocked his head.

Blazing blue flashed across me, and once more I was spin-soaring through darkness, gongs echoing. I almost thought of the gong-tormented, wine-dark sea, but pushed that away. An interlude in Byzantium would not be one I’d enjoy or relish, and probably would not survive. It wasn’t my archetype, even with the Yeats connection. Instead, I slip-slid sideways, letting the faerie dust that could have been air, but was not, swirl over my wings, as I banked around a sullen column of antiqued iron that was the gravity well of a star that could have shredded me into fragments of a fugue or syllables of a sonnet. The subsonic harp of Tara—or Cruachan—shivered through my bones and composite sinews.

Once more, I soared toward the shimmering veil that was and was not, resetting us on the heading toward the now-less-distant beacon that was Alustre.

And once more, the brilliant interlude blue slashed across me.

I stood under the redstone archway of a cloistered hall. The only light was the flickering flame of a bronze lamp set in a bracket attached to a column several meters away.

Before me stood a priest, a stern and white-faced cleric.

As any good Irish lad, I waited for the good father to speak, although I had my doubts about whether he was, first, truly a reverend father, and, second, good. His eyes surveyed me, going up and down my figure, taking in the uniform of the trans-ship captain, before he spoke a single word. “Your soul is in mortal danger,my son. You have sold it for the trappings of that uniform and for the looks that others bestow upon you.”

It’s truly hell when the elementals of overspace—or their abilities—combine with your own weaknesses. I swallowed, trying to regain a certain composure, trying to remind myself that I was in an interlude and that other souls and bodies depended upon me.

“With all your schooling and knowledge, you do not even know that you have a soul,” he went on.“Knowledge is a great thing, but it is not the end in life. It can be but a mess of pottage received in return for your birthright.”

Mixed archetypes and myths were dangerous—very dangerous in overspace interludes. “If I do good,” I said, “does that not benefit everyone, whether I know if I have a soul or not?”

“Words. Those are but words.”

Words are more powerful than that, but following such logic would just make matters even worse. I concentrated on the figure in friar’s black before me. “Truth can be expressed in words.”

“Souls are more than words or truth. You are drowning, and unless you accept that soul that is and contains you, you will be eternally damned.” His voice was warm and soft and passionate and caring, and it almost got to me.

“I am my soul.” That was certainly true.

“You risk drowning and relinquishing that soul with every voyage across the darkness,” the priest went on.

“Others depend on me, Father,” I pointed out.

“That is true,” he replied. “Yet you doubt that you have a soul, and for that your soul will go straight to Hell when you die, and