hairy, he could just force himself to awaken. The dream had only as much power over him as he allowed it to have, but he did feel the need to find out why he was having it, especially coming as it did on the heels of Ria’s appearance and Dharinel’s warning.
It seemed as if he had walked for hours, when slowly Eric became aware that the character of the weirdwood had changed. He began to hear faint scuttlings behind him—they stopped each time he turned around—and now there were faint ghostly shapes flitting about at the edges of his vision: things with eyes that gleamed like faint red embers. And at last Eric realized why this place seemed so familiar to him.
“The sedge is withered by the lake/and no birds sing.”
This was Keats’ haunted wood, home of La Belle Dame Sans Merci. With a lagging sense of danger, Eric remembered that the Bright Court weren’t the only elves inhabiting Underhill who might be sending him messages. The Unseleighe Sidhe had their home here, too . . . the Dark Court that had been the stuff of human nightmares ever since humankind had crawled out of the caves.
Okay. Fun’s fun, but this isn’t going anywhere I like. Time to wake up now, Eric told himself.
But he couldn’t.

Jeanette Campbell came back to Threshold late that after­noon, and spent several hours in her private lab k