Angels Unawares
an excerpt

Gryf now led her on what seemed to be an extremely roundabout journey, back down the ladder into the abandoned chandlery and out the door she'd come in by, which now opened into the back of an ornately decorated theatre. Two men on the stage in elaborate cloaks and masks were fighting a stylized duel with rapiers, their movements precise and elegant, as clouds of butterflies swirled in the air around them. Gryf and Nesh moved rapidly along the back wall, ignored by the audience, and out through a door on the other side into an armoury. They walked three times clockwise around a rack of pikes, Gryf keeping hold of Nesh's sleeve the whole time, and back through the same door, and appeared in the cabin of a ship. "Careful," Gryf said, "this next part's tricky," and opened one of the portholes and stepped out toward the green-black water below. Terrified, Nesh gulped air and clutched Gryf's arm, only to find herself crouched in the doorway of a tent, looking out at a campfire that flickered in a circle of black rocks on the white sand of a desert. A pregnant moon hung low over the horizon, and the air was so cold it seemed to burn. "Ush Fenn," Gryf said. "We're almost there." He lifted an edge of canvas and they crawled out under the wall of the tent into a bustling kitchen, and from there into a winding staircase in a tower whose windows looked out over the edge of a cliff, and up to the top of the stairs and out into a quite ordinary dormitory-style room, with neatly made beds in a double row with trunks at their foot and a line of desks against the wall untidily strewn with papers and books. Two girls about Gryf's age glanced up disinterestedly as they entered. "This is home," Gryf said.