each separate grove of trees hedged by overgrown hawthorns. Blue mists weaving across the moss-covered ground. Tree stumps dotting the ground; their jagged edges worn smooth by Threall’s ever-present, soft and fragrant wind.
I had feathers, I had wind.
Three trees to avoid in the pasture. Two black walnuts, down at the far end. Skirt over them, be careful of—
I could hear the outside world again.
Another swoop and then another run. A close-up of the lone tree at the dead end of the clearing: one ancient beech tree, growing under the lee of the sheer wall of rock. Surrounding it, a hand-constructed fence, made from broken branches, and sharp spars of wood, all of them jammed hard into the ground at a forty-five- degree angle so that each dead bough was fitted into the complex embrace of the one below it.
I circled Mad-one’s lair, trying to see through the deep foliage. Past the knotted and gnarled boughs. Looking for a mystwalker, dressed in a long blue gown.
“Hedi?” I heard Trowbridge cry.
No, not back down to where there was nothing but a terrible future. Not there. Choices—the repercussions that would follow them—were being pursued, and things—precious and irreplaceable—were going to be destroyed, unless I did the thing that only I could do.
I flapped my wings, hoping to soar.
One last, terrible pain.
I heard one last despairing, “Hedi!”
And then finally, I was free.
This felt a tad repetitive.
Once again, I was flat on my stomach, eyes closed, skin registering the prickling resistance of the moss beneath me. For a bit I lay there, recovering, because, for the record, deliberately growing a body is just as horrendously painful as purposely cutting yourself off from your mortal shell. It’s all about gravity, you know? Most of us don’t realize the constant tug of it or even recognize the weight of our body.
Then again, most of us can’t travel to Threall.
A faint breeze, sweet and floral, teased my hair. It picked up a paper fragment of a soul ball and played with it with sly cruelty, impaling it for a taunting second on the curved thorn of a hawthorn before sending it skipping across a brackish puddle. I tracked its progress with my eyes—this fluttering scrap, once the sheath of a soul, now a toy to a heartless wind—feeling strangely sad and old, as it was carried past the scaled trunk of the Old Mage’s black walnut tree.
Each time, I land here. Not under the canopy of the Black Mage’s specimen, but near this wind-battered relic. Why? Was I more like Lexi than I knew? Did my covetous soul recognize that magic lay beneath Threall’s thin crust? That beneath my belly were the wizard’s roots, ebbing life—a fibrous pathway to a mind both agile and—
Rolling to my knees, I forced my attention from his dying tree and found things, if possible, had only gotten worse in Threall during my absence. Daylight was waning and with its creeping loss bomb craters had proliferated, trees had suffered limb amputations, and the once serene, mossy clearing had nearly finished its de-evolution into an unloved wetland.
So much water. So much mud and mangled moss.
A few feet to my left, just past her foxhole, the Mystwalker sat slumped on a tree stump, her feet resting on a broken tree branch. She half turned, her lip twisted in a predictable snarl. “’Tis but you,” she noted.
Evidently, I’d been recast from threat to irritation.
I rose to my feet to gaze better at the disordered forest beyond the straggling line of hawthorns. The woods were dark and quiet.
“It is the wildness in you,” Mad-one said quietly.
When I turned, she nodded toward the sanctuary of the trees. “Your soul recognizes its loss and wants it to be reconciled. It is why that side of my Threall fascinates you.” Then she studied me, her head tilted, her eyes weary and bleak. “You should find a place of concealment. It would be a pity to lose the chosen one before she is of practical use.”
“And who or what am I hiding from?”
“The same vile beast as before—the devil’s spawn.”
He had to be one big-ass monster to have done this much damage. The cudgel lay where I’d dropped it. I bent to pick it up, and said, with as much casual indifference as I could muster, “I see no spawn.”
“He will return.”
“Where’d he go?”
Her mouth flattened.
Ah. So he’d returned to where she could not—home to Merenwyn.
The sudden leak of sympathy I felt for the Mystwalker of Threall turned me testy. “You want to tell me why you haven’t blown the ‘devil’s spawn’ off the edge of the world like you once tried to do to me?”
“He is fleet of foot,” she said sourly.
Great. The Threall destroyer was a
I blew some air through my teeth. “If I could fly like you, I’d have nipped up to the top of the Black Mage’s tree, and ripped his soul ball out of its boughs faster than you could say rock-a-bye baby.”
Using the slow voice usually reserved for speaking to very young children, she said, “He has cast a ward of protection around the citadel of his cyreath—surely you can see that? And even if I wished to pass through its cloying barrier, my soul is bound. I cannot hurt a member of the Inner Court or its mage. If you were a
A long finger, soot tipped, smeared with mud, pointed toward the nearest tree. “That is a citadel.” Then she gestured toward the soul ball. “That is a cyreath.” With a look of utter disgust, she wiped her hand clean with her skirt. “Also, that which you would know if you were a mystwalker with the most rudimentary education.”
I had a comment for that—something along the lines of “Oh shut up, Miss Smarty-pants”—but refrained. Instead I asked, “How bad is his ward?”
“You could pass through it,” she replied, her voice thoughtful.
Could I?
Gray-green lichen crawled up its twisted trunk.
Climb that? How? That first fork was chin-high, if not higher. I’d need to perch my foot on top of one of those bulbous growths, and insert my hand into a dark knothole—
