Off to his left. “Here!”
Kell looked toward the sound, then at where the hedge still swayed from when Saeldian’s shoulder brushed against it in their flight, almost in the opposite direction. They would have had to run through him to be over there. Fucking cheating magic fey hedges! But maybe that was his ball. He bent and reached for it, but the ball rolled away from his fingers and shot into the air.
“Fuck!”
Kell watched it soar…and then stop, falling into the center of the maze.
Saeldian shouted, “What!”
“Your ball went to the middle when I tried to pick it up.”
“Mine? Where was it?”
What in the Nine Hells? “You were standing over it when I came in.”
A pause. “I haven’t seen you.”
That wasn’t true. “Your sleeve cuff has loose threads. The left one.”
“It doesn’t. My armor is fine.”
Saeldian hadn’t been wearing armor—no, they had been wearing the scale armor made of leaves that Osalor had critiqued.
“If you find a ball, just try to pick it up and go to the center.”
“Right. So we’re moving again?”
“Moving again.”
The Saeldian he saw wasn’t real. It was a dream—no. Shuahn had taken them to the dream. So he’d seen…what he expected to see? It didn’t make sense.
Kell recentered his focus on the leather ball he had held while Shuahn had told them about bonds and stones. He moved without trying to think his way in the direction he followed. Right, right, left, skip, left…
The center. And Saeldian, in their stylish, roguish wood elf armor.
“I found your ball,” Saeldian said.
“Was anyone standing over it?”
Saeldian nodded. “Osalor.”
Not him, as he’d expected. “Well, we’re here. All we have to do is put our balls in the bowl.”
“I can’t.”
“Why? Can’t you touch it?”
“If I try, it rolls just out of reach.”
“So it’s mine?”
Saeldian shook their head and pointed at another ball nearby. “I tried both of them.”
“Maybe we have to do it together.”
“Worth a try. On three, not go. One, two—”
Kell bent and picked up the ball.
