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Maud speaks of this as a specter from past dreams,Willie thought, rapidly analyzing what would be needed. Very well. First the sign for the Fifth Element.

He sketched it in the air, but felt no tremor in the veil between the world we know and those beyond.

Another element must be subordinate to the first, or we shall have no form. Maud is fire, so I shall sketch that . . .

The results were more certain than Willie could have imagined.

Maud had been facing the window. Now she reeled back a few paces as if confronting some figure standing before her. Her lips moved in prayer or entreaty, but Willie heard nothing but a moan of terror.

MAUD

“Who are you?”

Maud had meant the words as a challenge, but they sounded thin and timorous. Oddly, the very weakness of her own voice gave her courage. Hadn’t her father told her to fear nothing, not even death? Hadn’t she lived her life by this maxim, facing and conquering each fear one at a time until now she feared nothing?

“Who are you?”M aud repeated, and though this time her voice was stronger, she noted that the words did not reverberate in the air but were swallowed, as if she and the Lady in Grey stood within a fog.

The Lady in Grey looked at her, and those eyes Maud had always thought of as sad held a mocking expression.

“You know my face,”th e Lady in Grey replied.

“It is much like my own face,”M aud said, “but you are not me. Who are you?”

“You are wrong. I am you—in a sense. I am more than you and less. I am the myth and mystery of yourself that you have created, Maud Gonne. I am the Irish Joan of Arc, Cathleen ni Houlihan, Queen Maeve of Connaught. I am the Woman of the Sidhe who showers her blessings upon the poor peasant folk and who brings misfortune to their enemies.”

“This is not possible,”M aud protested, clinging to a rationality she did not feel. “I have caught glimpses of you since I was a child. Those identities of which you speak are more recent dreams.”

“Since as a child of four,”th e Lady in Grey agreed, “clinging to your father’s arm in the presence of your dead mother you have seen me. There he said to you, ‘You must never be afraid of anything, even of death’ and you believed him, though he himself was trembling under the weight of grief and fear.When you took his words to you as a talisman, then I was born. Vows are powerful things, especially vows kept. They are absolutes, and so bring the world of the real to rub against that of the ideal. Today, your idealistic friend and his rituals provided the razor to cut away the barrier and bring us face-to-face.”

Maud did not wish to believe these words, yet she could not deny the evidence of her senses. This woman possessed her face, her bearing, and her features. Oddly, in those features Maud saw nothing of the beauty she knew was her own, a beauty she had used to gain her way since first she realized she possessed beauty and that it was not a gift, but a tool. But though the Lady in Grey had Maud’s features, she had no beauty. She was as hard as Maud knew her own soul to be.

The Lady in Grey reached out and caressed Maud’s face. Her hand was very cold. Strangely, for all the ways they were alike, the Lady was slightly shorter than Maud, but as Maud looked down into those eyes so like her own, she felt none of the confidence that her considerable height usually granted her.

“So Willie has brought us face-to-face,”Maud said, stepping back from that cold touch. “Why did he do that?”

“He is sensitive, your young poet, and rightly sensed that I am a danger to you—and even more, a danger to his dreams of someday wedding you.”

Maud shook her head, exhaustion, defeat, and sorrow flooding her like a tangible wave.

“Never,”sh e said.“I cannot accept his love.”

The Lady in Grey laughed mockingly.

“You fear his love. You fear the disclosures it would force from you.You fear . . .”

“I fear nothing!”M aud interrupted hotly.

“Then why do you lie to Willie so persistently? Why not tell him that