Nell looked past Susan and gasped. Beneath them, at the very center of the valley, lay a great white fortress.
“A castle!” Kate breathed. “Is it a castle?”
The Master Watcher had gone rigid. He was staring at Susan, eyes round, unable to respond. Nell smiled grimly. For once, someone had made him keep quiet.
She looked gratefully at Susan, who still stood squinting into the valley. After another second, Susan relaxed and took a step backward.
“Let’s go in now,” she said.
Nell glanced at the Master Watcher, who was trying to collect himself. A sheen of sweat glistened on his smooth forehead.
“Yes,” he whispered. “Yes, let’s go down.”
He stepped into the path carved in the mist, and Nell saw him look back once at Susan, his face tense, before he turned and led them down into the valley.
Like the rhythm of the distant sea, the dull undertone of the mist was ceaseless. It washed up the mountain and into the woods, ever present beneath the throb of crickets and the trill of birds. Even dreaming, the exile heard it.
The mist, taking.
The mist, erasing.
Again a dream. This time, there were only footsteps lost to the roar. Like a tidal wave, unstoppable, unbreakable, ever coming, ever there, the mist flowed across the valley, up to the highlands and back again, a great unthinking beast, always hungry.
And then the sound stuttered. For a moment, it broke.
The exile woke and thought, Dreams are wishes. Put them away or you will be undone with longing; you will go mad with hope.
But it was not the sound of the dream that echoed now through the dawn. It was a different sound.
More felt than heard, like a pressure in the air, but there. The mist, retreating.
On a shelf in her grandmother’s house back home sat a series of nesting boxes that Nell had loved to play with as a little girl. She would put one in the next and take them apart again, fascinated by boxes within boxes, space inside space.
As the group made its way down toward the sanctuary now, the white stone fortress reminded her of those boxes. Three concentric squares of huge snow-colored stones lay below them, separated by vibrant strips of green. At the center of the smallest, the squares gave way to a circle, a single dome resting within a bull’s-eye.
“Is that someone’s house?” she asked the Master Watcher.
His expression told her clearly to be silent. But Nell had had enough of that.
“Is it?”
His voice tight, he answered, “No. It’s the heart of the sanctuary. The place our council meets.”
“So where do people stay?”
“In the first band.” He turned his face from her then, a door slamming shut.
They descended through a wide grassy slope. On either side of it, crops and orchards crisscrossed the hill. Something about them struck Nell as odd, and after a second she realized what it was: she’d never seen so many different kinds of food growing together. Lines of green corn waved beneath trees studded with plums. Knobby peach trees gave way to rows of oranges, apples, and pears. Yellow wheat fanned behind braided grapevines.
She saw Max looking, too.
“How do you get all this to grow together?” he asked the Master Watcher. “I never saw anything like it back home.”
The man turned his head briefly in Max’s direction.
“Patience” was all he said, but in a tone that showed he was pleased with the question. Nell suppressed a sigh. Why was it that “Be quiet” to Max really meant “Ask me later”?
She left the thought behind as they continued down into the valley. The sun rose behind the great fortress, and for a while it was black against the blazing light. But then they stepped into the building’s shadow, and it was as if a curtain had lifted. The stones glowed white again. This close, Nell could begin to make out the details of the structure, and she saw that what she’d taken for a solid wall — the outer band — was much more. The man had said people lived in the band, and now she saw how: They were deep and hollow and marked by windows. Rooms and halls were built into the wall that surrounded the sanctuary so that it was one continuous building, a face with a thousand eyes. Nell searched for the doors beneath the many windows and found great archways cut into the white stone. From this angle, she could make out two.
The Master Watcher led them toward one of these, and walking into the clammy, shadowed tunnel, dim after the glare of the sunrise, Nell realized that she’d underestimated the size of the place. It must be nearly as thick as a city block back home, layer upon layer of stone that held the cold and the night and let them seep into the tunnel in bits of shadow and chilly breezes. Nell felt small, and suddenly lonely. She wondered how many rooms this wall held, as it wound around the first garden. Hundreds? More?
Ahead of her, Kate clung to Susan’s hand, and Jean, usually tagging after Max like a puppy, seemed lost in the echo chamber of the tunnel.
“Jean!” Nell whispered. Her voice sounded harsh bouncing off the walls.
Jean looked back, and Nell offered her a hand. She was glad when her sister took it.
They emerged, blinking in the sudden brightness, into an interior garden, where a few people — as smooth faced as anyone back home — moved quietly along the walkways past beds of flowers and beneath shade trees. Seeing the Master Watcher, they nodded and stood back. Nell watched the man bob his head at them, wordless. So stuck up, she thought as he walked swiftly across the garden. She looked at Susan, wondering if she thought so, too, but her sister’s head was down, her brow creased.
