“Are you all right? Nothing’s injured?”
“Well, I’m not bored.”
“Where’s Spike?”
“I’m not sure. I can’t see him.”
Kaylin shrieked and clung for dear life as the Dragon veered to the side. “Concentrate on driving—I’ll look!”
* * *
Down was a long way away. Kaylin half doubted they would ever reach it; it felt as if they had been in flight for a long time. But the smoke—or fog, as there didn’t seem to be a fire—that had made visibility so terrible seemed to clear as they descended. Beneath the Dragon, she could see what appeared to be ground.
It was, sadly, ground covered in trees.
A cursory glance at those trees didn’t immediately surrender a clearing, and while the trees probably didn’t pose a problem for Dragons, they weren’t going to do Kaylin any good. She tightened her legs and clenched her jaw as Bellusdeo buzzed the tree tops, but the Dragon rose again, searching for somewhere convenient to land.
She settled, in the end, for inconvenient; the trees opened up around a lake, and the lake was possessed of something that might have been shore—if it had been longer and less rocky. Less inconvenient became hazardous as the rocks rose to impede the Dragon’s skidding halt.
Bellusdeo corrected course and pushed up off the ground before impact, but it was close.
Squawk! Squawk! Squawk!
“You couldtryto be a little helpful!” Terrano shouted. A quick scan of the lake failed to expose his presence, and his voice seemed to be coming from the rocks.
“I think he wants us to stop right in front of the...rocks,” Kaylin told the Dragon, who was now hovering. Hovering made the landing far easier, and she did as Kaylin suggested.
The rocks immediately fell, and Terrano climbed out of them, looking distinctly battered. “Honestly, the two of you. Could you not hear me screaming?”
“We heard the last bit,” Kaylin said, before Bellusdeo could reply; Terrano looked frazzled enough that the inevitable sarcasm or condescension wasn’t going to help the situation any. “What are you doing?”
“We’re in trouble,” he replied.
“Alsanis?”
“That’s part of the trouble. He’s not here. Or rather, we’re not there anymore.”
Severn?
Silence.
Kaylin swore.
* * *
The good news, such as it was, was that they were materially unharmed. The bad news? They appeared to be in the middle of nowhere. A kind of forest nowhere that reminded Kaylin of an insect-filled walk overland to the West March.
“Don’ttouch that,” Terrano snapped. Since Kaylin hadn’t moved, she felt this unfair. “It’s not actually water.”
“And the rocks?”
“Not rocks, either.”
“So...this is like the portal paths.”
He raised a brow at her, which conversely made him look younger than he usually did.
“The portal paths—at least at inception—could look like anything. The first time I walked the portal pathways, I entered a path that mimicked forest perfectly.” Until it hadn’t.
