The River Road

Two days to close the city's business, and then the party walked out of the world it knew. By the fourth night it was further into the Thornwood than any of them had ever been, and the forest had come to the fire.

Where the river goes

Quill spent a day in the Archive and did not find Celindara on a map. He found something nearly as good: merchant letters from the years when the city still traded, written by people who assumed the reader knew the way, and which mentioned only that the city lay on the western river — the Westrun, the same river that runs through Westmarch. Somewhere up it, deep in the trees.

Kaelen took that to the Grove, with Drakov alongside, and found the Archdruid teaching. Theron heard the name Celindara and gave Kaelen a long look — "If you want to know that location, you have the intent to go there" — and then gave him the road anyway:

"Follow the Westrun. You will come to two forks, and you stay with the right fork, and eventually you will come to Celindara. Well — simple doesn't mean easy. Hopefully I won't regret giving it to you."

The city lies past the Rangers' patrols and past any ground the druids travel. Asked what made it dangerous besides distance, the old druid shrugged. "Who knows what's there now? The forest swallowed the city. That doesn't mean something hasn't moved in since."

Two kinds of dream

Drakov carried the High Priest's question into the Sleepy Dragon, and Lyrique pointed him at two regulars, Joss and Kellan, who have the dreams nearly every night. There are two kinds, and they alternate. One is the dark place: something chained and bound, straining, and the dreamer stuck and helpless and certain it will get loose — the same dream Davian Goldscale has. The other is the glades: moonlit clearings, streams, waterfalls, animals, and once a woman — elven-looking, deep red hair, a gown of emerald green that glittered as if jewels were woven into it. "What had to be the queen of the forest or something, because she was beautiful."

Theron, asked about the woman, said she was not the lady of the Pools — the bearing was the same but the colours were wrong, Spring or Summer rather than Winter. His guess was Lady Titania, a peer of Oona's: the Archfey who rules the Summer Court. As for a whole city dreaming the same dreams, he offered the only mechanism he had: it means either powerful mind-magic close by, or a powerful sending aimed at many people at once. He did not know which. Davian, told all of it, sharpened the question further: "Is it more people than everybody, or just some people? Those people have something in common."

The price of a name

On the 11th Kaelen and Thalia went back to Vane & Daughters. Petra had the answer ready and the price with it: 250 gold. The party did not have it. Kaelen offered what he had instead — himself — and the counter came back as if it had been waiting: a future contract of commensurate value, forest work, guiding and retrieval, some of it "on the grey side of the law," none of it, she said, morally repugnant, and no killing. Thalia drew him aside and offered the out. Kaelen signed anyway. "I guide people through the forest all the time and I don't ask their business."

What the Eighth District sold him for it: the man who bought the route under the Warrens is called Rowan Redd — "what we in our business call an orchestrator. Someone you hire to do things you don't want to do yourself." He can be found, when he wants to be, at a tavern in Duke's Bridge called the Ledger and the Lamp; a word left with the bartender will reach him. And he paid for the tunnels on Greenleaf 1st — two weeks to the day before the fog.

The party decided Redd would keep. The forest would not.

Out of the city

They outfitted from their own purses — Lyrique down to her last coins — and left on foot, following the Westrun west, with an order of march that has held since: Kaelen leads and scouts and hunts; Thalia covers the party's tracks; Drakov prays at every camp; Quill keeps the chronicle; Lyrique keeps everyone's spirits up. The first day was the familiar road to the Pools. The second reached the first fork, forty miles out, where the left branch runs toward the Singing Pools. Kaelen quietly offered Drakov the detour — the lady of the Pools might know the dream-woman by description. Drakov said no, for now. "Main objective. If we have time on the way back." They kept right, and the forest closed in.

The knight

On the third day, on a game trail off the river, a knight in green-and-gold armour stepped out of the trees ahead of Kaelen — tall, built like an elf, visor down, longsword drawn. "Halt, traveller. You have ventured into the deep of the forest. This is not your territory."

Kaelen told the truth. They sought an ancient secret long buried; they would take only what they could hold in their minds; they would do nothing to disturb the balance of the Pact. The knight looked at him. "You are a Ranger of the Green, are you not?"

"I shall let you pass. However — we will be watching. Should you violate the Pact, you will pay the price."

Asked what they should avoid, the knight's answer took in the whole of the deep wood: "I would avoid proceeding from here — but that doesn't seem like something you are about to do." A fist to the chest, returned, and he was gone into the trees. It was the first creature any of them had met who could confirm, by its own conduct, that the Pact binds the fey as well as the city — and that somebody out here polices it.

The toll

The fourth day brought them to a place where a road had once crossed the river: paving stones under three hundred years of vine, cut steps down to the water, the ghost of a bridge. Out of the water came a troll — claws, a mouth like a cellar door, and a toll. "This my river. Must pay. We hungry." It looked Thalia over with professional interest. "She looks good. Your food may pass."

They paid in supply rather than blood — two days' food from Kaelen's pack, two from Drakov's — and the troll let them cross. "Eat good tonight." Beyond the ford they passed the second fork, kept right, and ran out of directions. Between them and Celindara there was now nothing but forest.

Three trees

That night, on Kaelen's watch, the undergrowth rustled from two directions at once. He woke the two who could see in the dark first, then kicked the other two awake, as three awakened trees with eyes burning emerald green came in on the camp.

One of them reached Quill first and slammed him half to death with a single limb. He got up, and the camp vanished into black cloud and freezing rain — Sleet Storm — the ground ice, the trees slowed and slipping. "Get to the water!" Thalia rolled to the river's edge and put an arrow into the nearest; Drakov threw a shield of light over Quill and swung; Kaelen held the bank. And Lyrique, with a tree bearing down on her, put her hand to the amulet at her throat — "I don't want to be here" — and was simply a hundred feet away, as if she had stepped through a door that was not there. Not a spell. Something the necklace does. From safety she cursed two of the trees with Bane.

The trees waded into the sleet, one of them going down on the ice.

That is where the night was left: four days out, both forks behind them, the food already thinned by a troll, and the forest's own pickets in the camp.