Sebastian

another landscape and stayed. You've been here more years than I have. Why aren't you thinking of leaving?"
    Addison's smile was sweet and bitter. "I never said I was a good man."
    *
    Glorianna walked toward the source of the dissonance in the water-horses' landscape—the dissonance that had set her teeth on edge when she'd walked through her garden to check the feel of her landscapes.
    This dissonance had made her angry. The other " weed" in her garden left the taste of despair burning at the back of her throat.

    Lee would find out what had thrown their mother's heart into such confusion. Nadia would talk to him, would tell him what was wrong, and he would do what he could to ease the trouble. Or at least find out the source of the trouble. Because she didn't want to consider the unthinkable—that her mother's heart was no longer attuned with hers, that something in Nadia had changed so much she no longer fit in a landscape held by Glorianna Belladonna.
    Lee would take care of whatever trouble waited at home. Whatever had made the wrongness in this landscape was a task only she could deal with.
    Whatever? She knew what had left Its mark on the waterhorses' landscape. She just didn't know how It had gotten here.
    When Sebastian had told her about the waterhorse being killed, she'd gone to the pond. There had been a stain of Dark that didn't fit with this landscape, that didn't resonate with her. But shed found no sign of an anchor that could be used as an access point, so she'd sent her resonance out over the land, concentrating the power on the pond and the land around it until it was in harmony with her once more.
    The stain of Dark hadn't been completely washed away, but it should have faded by now—unless someone full of dark emotions that resonated with that Dark had passed by this pond often enough to feed the Dark, providing the Eater with just enough of an opening to alter the pond again to be an access point for one of Its landscapes.
    Wishing she hadn't ignored Lee's sharp order to bring a lantern with her, she hurried toward the pond until, in the waning light, she spotted what she thought was a dark, oddly shaped rock. Then the smell of blood and vomit made her gag.
    Fighting to control her churning stomach, she approached warily and stared at the severed horse's head a long time before shifting her focus to the pond a few man-lengths away. There was only one thing that had been locked away in the Eater's landscapes that could bite through muscle and bone like that. Death rollers.
    A freshwater pond would suit them, but the waterhorses came from a northern climate, so this landscape should have been too cold for death rollers. Unless the creatures had changed in the long years they'd been taken out of the world and were no longer dependent on the heat of the sun to warm their bodies.
    Or the pond was nothing more than a place where they would hunt for prey and then go back to their own, warmer landscape. Either way, the Eater needed a way to reach this landscape in order to alter the pond, which meant It had an anchor nearby that was small enough to escape detection—or there was a bridge Lee didn't know about that was giving It access.
    And if It had access to this landscape, it could reach the Den or take the bridge to…
    Oh, Guardians of the Light, was that why there was something wrong with Nadia? Had the Eater of the World crossed over the bridge to Aurora? Was it already altering the village, changing streets into rust-colored sand so that anyone who walked there would be pulled into the bonelovers' landscape?
    Would the pond where children swam in the summertime become a hunting ground for death rollers? Or what if It hadn't reached the village? It wasn't that far between the border of this landscape and Sebastian's cottage—and the bridge that crossed over to the path that led to Nadia's home was behind the cottage. What if she was under attack? What if Lee stumbled into trouble and was seriously injured before he had time to impose his island over whatever was happening at home and get himself, Nadia, and Jeb to safety? And what about Nadia's gardens? Every one of those landscapes had a bridge that crossed over to Sanctuary. And that was the Eater's ultimate goal: to crush the places that were beacons of Light, the places people, simply by knowing they existed, used to hold on to feelings of love and kindness and hope.
    So why was she worried about horse-shaped demons being fodder for