Ore-Locks remained silent, studying their surroundings, and Wynn turned her attention ahead.
Above them, the lowest branches of the largest trees were thicker than her body. Higher still, they had long since twisted and intertwined. Not a single night star showed through the canopy. It was all too quiet.
“What is that up ahead?”
Wynn flinched at Chane’s rasp right behind her head. At first, she couldn’t see anything beyond Althahk and his horse. A slight flicker appeared, followed by more. As they drew closer, those glimmers took shape as distinct lights. Some of them were too high above the ground.
“Dwellings ... in the trees,” Chane whispered.
Wynn couldn’t quite make out what he saw. His vision at night was far better than hers. Shade huffed once, and Wynn twisted her head. The dog stared back and huffed once more—one single utterance, too startlingly familiar.
Wynn remembered Chap’s system used with Leesil and Magiere. He’d used one bark for “yes,” two for “no,” and three for “unknown” or “uncertain.” Had Shade seen this in some memory of Wynn’s, and then added it to her own reluctant vocabulary?
Shade huffed once more.
Wynn frowned, turning forward again. Perhaps it was a good thing, but right now it was just unsettling.
“Not only domiciles,” Chane added, and pointed upward over Wynn’s shoulder. “That is a shop of some kind.”
There was no sign of a city or any such large settlement ahead, but they must have reached its outskirts. Even Ore-Locks craned his head back in astonishment.
Wynn’s eyes adjusted to those glowing points of light spread upward into the great trees’ heights. The thickest branches were the size of normal tree trunks. A complex system of walkways stretched between various levels.
People went about their ways in early nightfall. Tall elves stood on or walked the paths, stairs, and landings, circumventing structures mounted around the trunks or perched out on the more massive branches. Of those few that Wynn could make out passing near glimmering lanterns of glass and pale metals, everyone moved without a care for the heights.
“Lunacy,” Ore-Locks said. “One’s feet should remain upon the solid earth, as intended.”
Wynn wrinkled her small nose, remembering what he’d called the patroller during the confrontation.
“Don’t you ever again call one of them yiannû-billê—‘bush baby’ again,” she told him softly.
“Heat of the moment,” he replied under his breath.
Dwarves were a curious and accepting people. Wynn had never expected to travel with one who might be a bigot. It was one more thing that separated him from his kind—and all the more offensive considering his disguise. He was still attired like a shirvêsh of Feather-Tongue, who was a wise and worldly traveler spoken of in dwarven sacred myths and legends.
Chane leaned past Wynn’s side. She watched his gaze roam the heights in fascination. While he sometimes expressed arrogant attitudes and he could be coldly judgmental, new experiences always riveted him. If Chane hadn’t been forced into death and beyond it, he would’ve become a true scholar, no doubt.
Homes and small-to-medium structures blended into the leafy upper reaches, making it difficult to distinguish where one ended and another began. All were made of plank wood, though Wynn thought some roofs might be covered in cultivated moss. The branches of these huge spruces and oaks and gargantuan maples dwarfed the trees she’d seen along the journey.
One wavering light, low to the ground, caught Wynn’s eye. Not all of the settlement was built above.
Those lower structures were all dark but for a few lanterns somehow suspended along the paths between them. Perhaps these were for the more trade-and craft-related pursuits. How had all this come to be? Why did Lhoin’na choose these strange, high settlements, as opposed to the an’Cróans’ wilder enclaves upon the earth and their homes inside of living trees?
Shade whined, nosing into Wynn’s side. Wynn reached back, stroking the dog’s cheek.
Sudden memories of the an’Cróans’ wild Elven Territories rose in Wynn’s head—but they were not her own memories. The Lhoin’na forest must seem different to Shade, and Wynn hoped it didn’t make the young majay-hì too homesick.
“Althahk ... veasg’âr-äilleach!”
The patrol leader slowed his horse at the call of his name. Wynn drew in the reins as she searched the heights for the greeting’s source. A tall elf stood at a walkway railing ornamented with swirls and ovals of trained, leafy vines. It was hard to make him out, but a nearby lantern sent white and silver shimmers through his long, unbound hair.
“And fair evening to you, Counselor,” Althahk returned in their tongue.
“What brings you in so late, Commander?” the counselor asked. “And why do the Shé’ ith escort visitors to ...”
Wynn was too busy with that one unfathomable word to wonder about the long pause. That term wasn’t in the Elvish she knew or the older dialect of the an’Cróan. The root shéth meant “quietude” or “tranquillity,” sometimes “serenity.” Perhaps what she’d heard was something older still.
“The old one is looking at us,” Chane whispered from behind.
“It is odd, indeed,” Althahk answered back, and turned a stern eye on Wynn.
No, not at her, but at Shade.
“I will speak with you tomorrow,” the elder answered back.
By the time Wynn looked up, he was gone. Althahk clicked his tongue, and his horse moved on. Flicking the reins, Wynn guided the wagon onward.
In breaks between settlements, the forest’s guardian trees overwhelmed any hint of civilization. Glimpses of dwellings soon came more often, to the point where long, extended walkways began joining one to the next. Buildings among the massive trunks multiplied upon the forest floor, until Wynn couldn’t follow the pattern of them in the darkness, even by the wispy lantern lights along paths above or below.
The wagon rounded a gradual bend where the darkness appeared to break beyond the trees.
A sea of light struck Wynn as Althahk turned a final sharp bend. Her eyes popped as the group rolled through a living arch of two trees grown together high above.
Wynn was still blinking at spots of glare when a’Ghràihlôn’na—Blessed of the Woods—filled her whole view.
Sau’ilahk materialized upon the road a stone’s throw from the massive forest’s edge. He had already backtracked to find the caravan along another route; Wynn was no longer with it. Alone in the full night, he knew that she had crossed into those ancient trees and was on her way to the Lhoin’na sages.
Sau’ilahk could not follow, but what of Chane?
The road was the only way the wagon could have passed. If Chane had been left behind, he would be waiting here. Or had he gone with her somehow?
Impossible—unless there was more to that strange little ring.
Sau’ilahk wavered, staring about the grassy plain. It was a bitter place he had heard of only in his living days. So much had begun and ended here. An age ago, a line had been drawn, marked by where autumn’s dead grass met the ever-living green of that forest. The war’s waves of victory had broken here. But that wasn’t what had ended the war.
It had been as if Beloved had simply given in.
The time of victory would come again, and next time, the Children would not lead. Sau’ilahk would regain youth and beauty, awe and glory. He alone would dominate Beloved’s forces. Their worship would feed him more than all of the life he had consumed in his altered existence.
But what of Wynn Hygeorht? What did she seek in this place? Where was an orb that would free him? Where was lost Bäalâle Seatt?