Aedan had paled. “Thank you,” he said. “It seems you’ve saved my life.”
“Just be careful of that hanging moss,” she replied.
“They like to make nests in it, and they can’t tell the difference between the moss and your hair. If you let one get into your hair, even if it doesn’t bite you, it might still lay eggs.”
Aedan still felt rather queasy whenever he thought about that. Since then, he had fought in many battles, and had faced several of the horrors the Shadow World had to offer, but nothing had ever made his skin crawl like the thought of tiny eggs hatching in his hair, releasing a horde of little white spiders with sharp fangs dripping poison. He had avoided the hanging moss ever since, as if contact with it would be lethal. And, he thought, when one considered what it sheltered, it easily could be.
“What are you thinking?” Sylvanna asked, riding up beside him on the trail through the misty woods.
Her voice brought him sharply back to the present once again, and he realized he had been preoccupied with reverie. That was entirely too dangerous to be countenanced under present circumstances, but he was exhausted-they all were-and his mind had simply started drifting of its own accord.
“I was thinking of spiders,” he replied to her question. “Little white spiders, hatching from a score of tiny eggs.”
For a moment, she stared at him, frowning with puzzlement, and then her face cleared as she suddenly made the connection. “Ah, you were thinking back to the first time we journeyed through the Shadow World.”
He nodded. “In some ways, it seems as if it were only yesterday. But in others, it seems like a lifetime ago.”
“It was about five years ago, wasn’t it?” Sylvanna asked. “Or was it longer?”
“It was eight years,” he replied, smiling to himself.
Elves were not good with the concept of time. Being immortal and consequently having all the time in the world, they found little significance in time, unlike humans, who had less of it and therefore paid it more attention. “Eight years in which a great deal has happened.”
For one thing, he thought, as he glanced at the emperor riding a short distance in front of him, Michael had grown up. At twenty, he was still young, but physically, he was a full-grown man. He had shot up to over six feet and was now taller than Aedan. He outweighed him, too, by at least forty pounds. Michael had taken his training very seriously, working out with the weapons master every day. As a result, he had developed a husky, muscular build, with a thick chest and large, powerful arms able to swing a two-handed broadsword with great speed and strength.
Many young men of the empire were little more than boys at his age, but Michael had done a lot of living in the eight years since Tuarhievel, and those years had been fraught with unrest in the provinces and heavy responsibilities at home.
Boeruine had been only the beginning. When they had returned to Anuire after their abduction by the goblins and their brief stay in Tuarhievel, they discovered that a little over a year had passed on the outside.
That was the difficulty in traveling from the elven lands, where time’s flow was affected in peculiar, inexplicable, and unpredictable ways. One was never certain how much time would have passed when one came back to human domains, even when going through the Shadow World.
Shadowwalking was not Aedan’s preferred mode of travel by any means, but Michael had employed it many times since that first journey. By creating a portal into the Shadow World, a halfling could at least temporarily suspend the flow of time. As Futhark had explained it, if they had a desperate need to travel from Anuire to Kal Kalathor, clear on the other side of the continent, and they absolutely had to be there as soon as possible, if they were to travel on horseback, even at a fast pace, changing mounts on the way, it could still take as much as a month. It would mean covering a distance of at least a thousand miles, even more if they went out of our way to avoid traveling through such potentially dangerous territories as the Coulladaraight and the Tarvan Waste.
On the other hand, if they were to shadowwalk through the world between the worlds, their journey would take roughly the same length of time …
but they could emerge back into the world of daylight almost at the same time as they had left to go into the Shadow World.
In other words, for them the same long span of time would have passed, but little time in the daylight world. With one exception. Elven realms.
In the same mysterious way that the laws of time were twisted in the Shadow World, so were they affected in the elven realms, which to Aedan suggested a correlation of some sort, though he could not venture to guess what it could have been. The point was that while time within the Shadow World seemed almost to stand still, in elven realms, it was completely unpredictable. It either “expanded’ or contracted,” and there was no way of predicting which way the effect would go. As a result, traveling from the elven realms into the Shadow World and emerging in human domains could have some interesting effects.
“I have never forgotten our first journey through this dreadful place,”
Aedan said as he and Sylvanna rode side by
