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“We have arrived,” he said.
Her brow furrowed in confusion. The forest around them seemed no different, filled with rocks and roots and ice-choked streams. Pine trees towered over naked oaks. The aspens shimmered, a few still clinging to their golden leaves. The birds were louder here, the sound of water against stone more musical, but little else changed.
“I don’t—” she began, her eyes wavering.
Then her vision shifted, and Sirandel bloomed.
The two trees behind Castrin were not wood, but hewn stone, the bark carved by master hands. They even had roots, pouring right into the dirt. The few leaves still clinging to the smooth branches were not leaves at all, but colored glass, intricate and impossible. Red, gold, and purple, they cast shimmering shadows on the forest floor. The trees arched together, forming a simple kind of doorway.
Or a gate.
“We will walk the horses from here,” Castrin explained, taking his mount in hand. “Even you will know the way.”
Corayne started to bristle, but he was right. Never in a thousand years would she have found her way to Sirandel alone.
She slid from the saddle and her boots hit rock instead of dirt. There was stone beneath the underbrush, camouflaged like the rest, leading through the gate on a secret road. Carved foxes watched from the roots of the trees, one perched on either side like a pair of gate wardens. Corayne felt their unseeing eyes. She suspected there were real guardians in the trees, hidden Elders of Sirandel, who watched the gate.
“Is an enclave like a city?” she said, squinting through the forest. She couldn’t see any guards, but the stone trees grew more numerous with every step. Their glass leaves glittered like Castrin’s eyes.
Castrin shrugged. His horse followed him without being led, so used to his master and the Sirandel road.
“It depends,” he answered. “Some enclaves are little more than outposts, others villages or castles. Ghishan is a mighty cliff fortress, a jewel in the Crown of Snow. Tirakrion an island. Then Iona is a proper city, the oldest of our enclaves. It is there many of our people first entered this realm, from a Spindle long shifted.”
“Shifted?”
“Spindles do not just open and close, my lady. They move,” Castrin replied. “Over centuries, of course. It will be long years before the burning Spindle of Gidastern appears somewhere else.”
Corayne’s eyes widened. She pictured the golden needle that was the Spindle, spitting flame as it sliced across the Ward.
“I did not know that,” she said, worrying her lip. “Is the Ionian Spindle how you came here, Glorian-born?”
A shadow crossed Castrin’s face as they walked. This time it was Corayne asking the painful questions, and the immortal trying to avoid them.
“I crossed as a child, many hundreds of years ago,” he said stiffly. “We were exiled from a kingdom I do not remember. First through the Crossroads, and then, yes, to the land that became Iona.”
Exiled.Corayne tucked Castrin’s words away like jewels to be turned over later.
“The Crossroads?” she murmured, a picture of innocent curiosity.
“The door to all doorways, we called it once.” Castrin’s eyes went faraway and Corayne wished she could see into his memories. “A realm behind all the realms. With a Spindle to each land in existence. Its gates always moving, always shifting.”
Corayne’s throat tightened with the implication. “But the Crossroads is lost, like Glorian.”
“It is,” Castrin replied stiffly. “For now.”
She did not miss the way his yellow gaze lingered, first on her face. And then on the Spindleblade. A chill ran down Corayne’s spine but she hid it well. She wore her old self as a mask, letting her wide-eyed and curious nature rise up like a shield.
There was a Spindle in Iona once, a door to all doorways. A way for the Elders to return home. But there isn’t anymore.
A whistle snapped her thoughts in half and she looked back to Castrin. He whistled again, low and haunting. With a start, Corayne realized he perfectly mimicked an owl. Another whistle answered, hooting out of the trees.
In a blink, the immortals around her doubled, more guards appearing from the woods. They wore soft, purple leathers, embossed with the sigilof the fox. Half were red-haired and yellow-eyed like Castrin. The others varied in their coloring as any crowd in a port city. Bronze-skinned or moon-pale, black-haired or blond, even one silver-gray.
Castrin raised a hand to the guards, palm open in friendship. “I bring Corayne an-Amarat to Sirandel, under the Monarch’s own command.”
One of the guards narrowed his eyes and sniffed the air. “You bring hounds of Infyrna as well, Castrin.”
Corayne’s heart dropped into her boots.
