They sat, a little tense and a little sad as well, in the main room of their house. The children were all there, and Corinne, from Snowcap, was there as well. She would be caring for the three children while Aidan and Flame were gone. It was easier and safer for her to come to their warded home than for them, though they were warded as well, to stay with her.

Right on schedule the hum of portal magic began to build up in the room, and the rainbow shimmer opened up in the air in front of them. Radu stepped through. They each hugged the children, and both were trying not to think of the danger they were going into, of the possibility, however small, that they might not come back.

Their farewells said, they followed Radu through the portal. They emerged in a small, unadorned chamber with a bed in one corner, and a window that looked out over a sweep of forested hills. It was night, though the moon was up, casting stark shadows on the landscape below. "This is my room. I have told no one what I plan. I have tried to avoid even speaking of it, lest something be listening in, but I've swept this room for spells a dozen times, and found none, so hopefully it will be safe. The pair live in an abandoned castle a few day's journey from here. They have lived there for some years. I think it best if you make your own plans for how to find what I need. Even here I must fear the risk of them somehow being overheard, though I cannot imagine how, but they have been overheard in places I thought as secure. And that is what I need most, the knowledge of how they are doing that.

"You will need to leave here as quietly as possible. My people, as I said, know nothing of this, and seeing one of you would only terrify them. I have marked their castle on this map" He handed Aidan a small rolled paper. "Find what I need, and then return. When you come back I will need a way to know you from your doubles. A password, perhaps?"

Aidan nodded. "How about 'palindrome.' It's not a word likely to come up in normal conversation."

Radi smiled and nodded. "Excellent. I will show you to the door then."

They went quietly down deserted hallways and out into the field in front of the monastery. Radu gave them a whispered farewell blessing, though not a literal one, for Aidan's sake. A moment later they were both aloft, Flame having taken aerian form to fly with her husband.

"Do you think we can do this?" asked Flame after a time.

"Maybe. Getting them separated will be the really hard part. But convincing them that we're them... possibly."

"I don't know if I could. I mean... you're pretty good at acting, but I've never been any good at it."

"Well... maybe we can do it another way. What if we let them know who we are, but make them think we didn't want to?"

"Huh?"

"Radu said that even in supposedly secure rooms they were finding out what's going on. They may well already know that we're coming! I don't know how they'd listen in on this conversation, given that we're in the air, but since we know they've been spying on the monastery, they might have heard Radu talking to us, even if he doesn't think they could have. If you were evil, and you knew about this, what would you do?"

Flame blinked. "Uh. I have no idea."

Aidan laughed. "Maybe it doesn't speak well of me that I do, but I can think of several things, and the very first one is attempting to reverse the trick. They will want to separate us, and get one of us to take one of them right into the middle of Radu's people. I'd bet on it."

"But what good will that do us?"

"Lots! Think about it. If we can hand one of them over to Radu, unsuspecting, then Radu can find out what he needs. I know that there are clerical spells to pry the truth out of somebody. They just haven't managed to catch one of them before because they knew it was coming."

"So... we would be tricking them into thinking they were tricking us?"

"That's right!"

"But that's not going to work. I mean both of us are here. Even if we separate, we'd both be going back by the same route, and we'd end up running into each other and spoiling it, or something. So they wouldn't try and take us both back..." She trailed off, not wanting to complete that train of thought out loud.

Aidan did it for her. "No, they'd try to take just one of us back. And keep the other captive, most likely." Or kill the other, he thought, but he didn't say that out loud. "What I'm thinking of doing is going in by myself. I'm better at sneaking than you are anyhow. If they don't know we're coming then I can get your double alone, and try and get what we need from her. If they do know we're coming, then they're going to catch me. And I will bet you anything that once they do my double is going to want to pretend to be me, and you'll be able to lead him right into Radu's arms."

"How do you know your double is going to do that?"

Aidan grinned. "Because if I were evil it's what I'd do. We saw this when we were here last time. The people here are really very much like their counterparts on our world. Brianna was the same kind of person as the Brianna I knew. She said a lot of the same things, thought in a lot of the same ways. She was just shy and peaceable rather than aggressive the way our friend tends to be. My opposite..." he considered. "He'll think like I do, except there will be one thing in which he's totally different. And yours should be the same way. Apparently the one thing for them is that they like killing people."

"I still don't like this. It means you're going to have to let yourself get caught."

He chuckled. "I'll do all I can to avoid it. As I said, hopefully they won't know we're coming, and I'll get what we came for, and that will be that. But even if they do catch me, they probably won't keep me. I'm the world's best thief, recall. Few indeed are the cells that can hold me."

Flame smiled at him. "I thought you were the world's best retired thief?"

"Uh... yeah." Aidan went a little red and Flame giggled.

"You haven't been going back to your old ways, have you?"

"Well, not recently..."

"Define recently?"

He grinned. "This week?"

"Oh you!" She laughed.

They passed the rest of the night in light-hearted conversation. They flew on for some hours after the sun rose, before landing in a clearing and resting. Aidan was out cold almost as soon as he lay down, despite having to sleep on the ground. Flame was up a little longer, getting her dinner, but she soon joined him in slumber.