The Fathomless Caves by Kate Forsyth

flaring with quick agony if probed too hard, subsiding into a dull throb if left alone. Both Isabeau and Iseult had always chosen not to confront Ishbel, to leave the aching doubt alone, but now Isabeau realised how deeply it had hurt, knowing her mother had taken refuge in her strange enchanted sleep in preference to caring for her twin daughters herself.
    She saw Ishbel awaken, and look for her, but this time her mother smiled at her and embraced her, calling her by name. To Isabeau’s surprise and pleasure, she saw Ishbel now lay in a bed all hung with curtains, rather than in the nest of her own hair. Her husband and Isabeau’s father, Khan’gharad, slept peacefully by her side. Somehow the coil of the staircase had taken Isabeau across space as well as time, and it was the Ishbel of now, not of the past, who had responded to her inarticulate cry. Is all well? her mother asked anxiously, andIsabeau nodded, wiping away tears of sudden relief. She clung to her mother but the staircase was turning, and Isabeau was turning with it.
    She saw Lachlan lift the baby Bronwen from her bath, her fins streaming with water, her scales shimmering like mother-of-pearl. He shook her, hissing through clenched teeth, ‘Keep her away from me. By the Centaur’s Beard, keep this uile-bheist away from me and my son!’ And Isabeau took Bronwen in her arms, sick and shaking with fear.
    The little girl dissolved away into nothing in her arms. Isabeau was hurtling down the stairs now, back through all the grief and fire of the Samhain rebellion, back through the sick confusion of her feverish journey to Rhyssmadill. Each vision came so fast she barely had time to cope with the tumult of emotion, yet she knew she was swiftly approaching the time of her torture. She struggled to break the trance, to leave the stairway, to fly back up to the present. It was no use. Inexorably she was led back to that time, the moment when her world was cracked apart and remade, marred and spoiled forever. She saw Baron Yutta’s smile as he bent over her and in a paroxysm of terror and shame, she plunged down, deeper into the abyss, free-falling.
    The world spun around her, stars and night whirling past in dizzying spirals of white fire. She was falling so fast she could not breathe, her lungs squeezed in the grip of some cruel giant. Visions whirled with her as if seen from the corner of her eye, all blurred and distorted with tears. The shadow of a dragon crossing the moon. Meghan spinning wool and telling her stories.Holding Meghan’s hand and watching a young boy with laughing dark eyes turn cartwheels faster than she could run. Then she saw herself, a newborn babe, lying in the embrace of a great tree’s roots, a dragoneye ring clutched in her hand.
    Deeper she fell. A red confusion, filled with screaming and sobbing and the shadow of dragons’ wings. An unbearable pressure all around her. Then some sort of peace. Darkness. Floating. She curled in upon herself, resting, unsure where she was. The only sound was a great, distant booming, like the organ of the ocean deep. She rested there for a long time, grateful to be still, lulled by the boom of the ocean and the gentle rocking waves. Once again she felt herself dropping, though so slowly, so gently, it was almost imperceptible. She gave a little cry, reluctant to go.
    White radiance. Light filling her ears and eyes like water. Falling faster, the world spinning. A sudden disconnection, a high echoing scream as she fell immeasurable distances. Then she saw other lives, other times, though distantly, as if gazing through a clouded glass, and all twisted together into a vast helix that stretched both ways into the great infinity, like finely spun thread.
    The insight lasted only a moment. Isabeau drifted back down into her body and opened her eyes, wonderingly. It was dawn. She had two more nights to endure.
    She bathed again, trying without success to wash away the sweat and terror of the night. She read