I

THE PHANTOMDESTROYER

UPPER NORMANDY, 26 SEPTEMBER1066

The wind laughed. And the boy on the rock laughedback.

Wild-eyed and turning circles atop a massive boulder lodged in the face of a towering sea cliff, the smoke, smolder, and arrogant noise of the onrushing storm was just the thing to liven up an endlessly boring life lived on the thin edge ofnowhere.

Demanding the boy’s immediate return to the safety of their shack, his mother’s shout that he was stupid—“A brain like a hoof!”—was nothing new to six-year-old Wido. Nor was ignoring any attempt to interrupt his fun. Pointing at his ears and feigning confusion at her too many, too fast words, with a big smile and a wave he, instead, dropped onto his belly and began inching across the rock’s rain-slickened surface much as a larval bug just washed up out of the dirt. Indeed, taking malicious pleasure in turning his mother’s tremendous love for her only child into utter anguish, with his arms thrown wide and pretending to glide like a falcon in flight, Wido then dropped his head over the edge of the rock as if ready to swoop upon whatever fantastic beast might come crawling out of the turbid waterbelow.

Mother could scream all she wanted. Her threat of whipping his backside didn’t scare Wido a whit. The sky sizzling above him. The earth crumbling around him. None of it scaredWido.

God didn’t scareWido.

Only, as many times before, Wido had already crossed that fine line between thrill and terror, and no full-throated squeal of death-defying joy could disguise it. Telling himself that the little flinching of his muscles, that twisting of his gut was not fear, he was determined to not turn back up the steep-sided gully. Flee into his mother’s arms. She would win. Scream. Call him stupid for doing such a dangerous thing. Punishhim.

So ...no.

Rubbing down the gooseflesh on his arms, Wido again stood on the rock; glanced back at his mother; and the