“That’s a new chain.”
“The old one was broken,” Saeldian said. “I made sure the next one was sturdier.”
“Clever. Hold still.”
Osalor concentrated. Saeldian closed their eyes. Beside him, Lorzok leaned forward a little.
“This is an obscuring charm. It won’t last long, but it will hide you long enough to get to Eightbridge, and perhaps a day more.”
“I’ll be careful,” Saeldian promised.
“My protégé.” Now he offered his hand for Saeldian to take. He squeezed once and let it fall before opening glass doors to the moonlit garden just outside the windows.
“Nobble will show you out.”
Osalor seemed toforget his visitors as soon as he started wandering around his impossible garden. He didn’t look back as Kell and the others walked out of his realm, with no rest or welcome or even an offer of food for the road. Three steps away from the twinned trees and the path between and the way toOsalor’s domain had vanished, leaving only the truewild around them.
Kell retraced their steps just to see if it was an illusion, but he met only peaceful, gently blooming forest. Evicted, just like that.
When he turned back, Jubilee and Lorzok watched him. Saeldian faced his direction, standing the way Osalor had critiqued them into, but they looked anywhere but where they’d come from.
“Sheld.” Jubilee lifted her hand but put it down without touching Saeldian’s shoulder. “Do you need anything? Are you all right?”
Saeldian shook their head. “I think asking was very kind. I understand my patron’s concerns. I am well.”
The tiny starflowers around their feet wilted. Timtim hopped over and lifted to his hind legs, using Saeldian’s shin for balance.
They bent, looking Timtim in the face. “Do you want me to carry you? Up you come.”
Saeldian cradled the almiraj in the crook of one arm. Timtim stretched over their leaf-scale breastplate and set his head right where the tips of his ears would swish along their jaw.
Kell was glad Timtim had given what Saeldian couldn’t ask for and what Kell couldn’t offer.Osalor! What a—poltroon. What an ass. What a brute.Too much about Saeldian made sense now, and Kell didn’t want to understand them.
“All right. Next step,” Saeldian said. “I’m certain we’ll find the bridge Osalor was talking about. It’s very close by, obviously.”
“Obviously.” Jubilee picked up the thread. “We’ll find the bridge and then Kell can do the meditation thing he did to find you, Sheld. It only took a few minutes, and he knew exactly where to go. It’ll be easy.”
“And then we’ll be in Eightbridge,” Lorzok said. “Have you heard of it? How it works?”
“It’s where the spire of Menoriath fell,” Saeldian said. “Look, Osalor showed me what it looked like.”
An illusion sprang from their upraised palm. A shining, cut-jewel tower refracted rainbows with colors Kell could see but couldn’t name. It leaned just a little off-center. Buildings and towers clustered at its ankles, fading at the boundaries of Saeldian’s little vision.
“That’s the place,” they said, firm as an oak, making their voice confident as they believed what they said as hard as they could. “And any bridge can lead to Eightbridge, if you need it to badly enough.”
Essanderon’s Rest had been a forest first and a village second. It had been a place of sunshine and shade. Would Kell’s family dwell in the quilted city of Eightbridge?
It made sense. It wasn’t one court or the other. It was the safest place to be. Maybe they lived in one of the smaller domains that had gathered around the spire to make safety in numbers.
Everyone stood still, and Kell realized they were waiting for him to move. That made sense. He was the finder, after all. But Kell had no idea where they were, which was a funny thing to be concerned about in the truewild. That didn’t have meaning the way it did on Toril, where distance stayed distant.
It was time for Kell to guide them, and he could do this. They were in the truewild, and everything was fine. The ground and the air thrummed with music Kell knew. It was the music he heard when his mind wandered, or in the place between dreaming and awareness, or just barely audible in the corner of his ear. The music that snuck into his bow when he forgot to play a song and just made sounds.
Those sounds were the music of the Feywild, and it had been so long that he didn’t know he was remembering it. The music reached for a melody, a key, waiting for him to gather the stuff of it and—
—not sing. He hummed it in his head, turned clockwise around an ash, and there was the bridge, exactly as Osalor had described: an arch of stone blocks that crossed a depression that wandered between the trees. It looked sturdy, even if the stream it had crossed was gone. He could close his eyes just before he set foot on it and open them as he touched ground, and they would be looking at the spire, shining its impossible colors where the light touched it.
And Kell could not take one more step.
