He walked into the forest holding the image of the Dark Tower in his mind and making as straight as he could, more or less, toward the dell where he and Janet had first stumbled upon it. The water in the Rose shed a faint silver light around him, and some guidance must have been at work on his feet, for in less time than he thought possible, he came into the dell and looked up to see the Tower.

John paused a moment before he went on. It was not fear. In fact he rather felt like saying grace again, perhaps in song. Instead, he began to walk forward.

This time he was able to approach the tower without being cast into immobility. This time he passed on a sandy path between towering ramparts of thorn and climbed the curving outer stair to the tower door. He did not bother trying the latch. Instead, as in the dream of long ago, he touched the door with the Rose.

It blew open and rebounded from the wall behind with a sharp bang that echoed through the whole fortress. John passed into the dark room beyond and took a curving stair on the opposite wall. Above, at the next level, he walked into moonlight and birdsong.

Windows marched all around this wide room, so that it was like standing in a diamond-paned house of glass. It was stacked and hung with cages, and in each cage hopped and moped a little brown bird like the one he had seen a moment after Janet disappeared. How many were there? Hundreds? Thousands?

He heard the thrumming of a woman’s skirts and turned. It was—no. It was not Janet. That was impossible. She stood at the centre of the room, striped with light and shadow from the cages piled against the windows, and whispered his name, and held out her hands to him.

“John. You have come.”

John lifted the Rose like a shield, his heart beating in painful hammer-blows. “You know my name. How do you know my name?”

“Alas! Should I have forgotten it? I, who should have been your bride?”

“Then, if you be truly Janet, come.” He beckoned with the bright crimson flower.

Still she hesitated in the midst of the room, twisting her hands together. An anxious tremor shook her voice.

“May I, John?”

He almost flinched. Voices flooded into his memory.

It is an odd means you have chosen to prove your love for me.

John. Will you forgive me?

He had not forgiven her. Not until it was too late.

My little bird, with the necklace red, sings sorrow, sorrow, sorrow.

He lowered the Rose, straining his eyes to see her.

“Always,” he rasped. “Always.”

She stirred forward, and hesitated again. “Or will you vanish when I touch you,” she murmured, in a lifeless tone that struck despair into him, “like every other time?”

He shouldn’t trust her. He shouldn’t trust her. He moved forward, nearer. “Janet! What has become of you here?”

She turned her face away and in the dull hopeless voice that reminded him so painfully of Columbell, she said: “I gave up hope of you.”

I had a love. He swore truth, and was false.

“But I am your promised husband, Janet. I will always come to you.”

“I have heard it before,” she whispered, and turned her back on him. “Leave me.”

For a moment there was no sound but the murmur of her skirts as she retreated. John stood transfixed in a dreadful astonishment.

The light. The warmth. The high heart. Everything that made her the Janet he loved—snuffed out, desolated.

His mind moved slowly. She wanted him to leave. She was so far gone that she did not even believe he had come for her, and she wanted him to leave.

Was there nothing he could do?

Something cold trickled across his fingers. With a jerk, John steadied his drooping hand. He had forgotten it, and a little water had run from the heart of the Rose. That chill across his hand woke him out of his stupor. His voice cracked through the room.

“Wait!”

The hushing murmur of her skirt on the far side of the room paused. John lifted the Rose and shouldered through the narrow passage between the cages.

“I will not be forsworn, Janet. And I have here the remedy for your pains.”

Through the cage-bars he glimpsed her burst into motion again. Just as she reached the upward stair on the far wall he caught up to her, snatched her wrist, and pulled her back to face him.

“You,” she spat, abandoning all pretence, and snatched out a stiletto-dagger and struck at him. John flinched back, but the blow never reached him. Within a span’s breadth from his body there was a sharp ringing crack and the blade of her knife splintered into humming shards.

There was no mistaking the fay-harshness of her face. John’s heart lifted like a lark. “I.” And to see what would happen, he brushed her uplifted arm with the Rose.

At once the youth and beauty fell away from her, and she stood grey and bent before him, an old woman in bitter age.

That maddened her to a frenzy. “Cursed sneaking thief!” she screamed, beating her clawed hands uselessly against the unseen protection around him. “I will burn you, you poxy knave! I will tear out your eyes!” And she shrieked horrible things—spells of death, spells of torment, spells of malice and famine and pain.

Each word fell dead and empty to the ground.

Even so helpless she had held him once. John laughed at her, turned his back, and brushed another of the cages with the Rose. He was not entirely sure what he expected; certainly not for the bird within to spring into upright human form, bursting her cage like a strange and lovely rocket flowering across the night sky. The wooden laths of the cage scattered across the floor and the maid gave a short sobbing laugh as she found herself once more a woman.

But she was not Janet. John turned away from her and went through that room bursting cages like fireworks until only one was left in a forgotten and dusty corner. He approached it with his heart in his mouth—but she was not Janet. She came out in a rush of white jewelled satin, sparks glinting from her red-gold hair; she shook herself out to her full height and roared in a wonderful low ringing voice like a man’s, “Swounds, but I am stiff and cramped!”

John fell back a step, his mouth forming soundless words.

“Where is she?” the lioness shouted. “Where is the Witch? Set her before my face! Let all Faerie attest the true Queen’s return!”

But he mastered his surprise and wheeled away from her, holding the Rose high, kicking through the broken slats on the floor, pushing aside the other maidens in desperation, seeking the last cage of all. “Madam,” he cried over his shoulder, “yet a moment, I pray.”

The room was full of women and shattered cages, but where was Janet?

He glanced at the stair—upward on the right side of the room; empty—downward on the left; there! The old Witch, clutching one last unbroken cage. Even as he turned his head she fled on the downward way. Time slowed—he wheeled and made after her—soft, he must not spill the Rose—women scattering out of his way—stairs tumbling, tumbling under his feet—he reached her at last, caught her with an arm hooked around her shoulders, and touched the Rose to the cage.

Like Middleton Dale itself unfolding into many dimensions of beauty from under a commonplace exterior, Janet unfolded from the nightingale, bright and lovely, just as he remembered her from that Sunday afternoon so long ago.

He took a better grip on the Witch and swung her behind him up the stair. Then Janet reached up and laid a warm hand on his cheek, as if assuring herself he was real.

“John,” she choked, “oh, John, I knew you would come.”

She had kept faith. She had not doubted.

“Sweetheart,” he said, and then ran out of words.