Anest frowned, and urged his mount beside her. "This Circle calls our child? Why? How can this be?"
Lily raised her eyes at this, but to the Gate, and Wizard's Vale beyond. "I do not know. But therefore do I desire answers of my own."
True to the uncertain rendering of some ancient forgotten cartographer, Wizard's Vale opened before them in deep shadow, only to close behind them as though neither track nor vale had ever existed. It lay like a jagged cut across the ancient bones of the land, heavily overgrown with moss and fern, and overhung by the tangled roots of dense shrubbery. Here and there their way was faintly illuminated by a phosphorescent mildew that grew upon the petrified stumps of trees, a
strange phenomenon, they were to discover, that could be found only in Wizard's Vale.
"So ancient . . ." Lily breathed. "So very ancient . . . these stone remnants of trees are of an elder time so long past that even the Black Wood itself does not remember them. Time itself has turned them to stone over the long turning of the ages. There is the memory of an ancient magic in them . . .
but it is of a kind utterly strange to me. There are echoes of ancient sylvan beings and their alien paganism . . . demon-like, and yet neither evil nor good . . . tiny, capricious, furtive things that lived in the dark places of a dark world, in the days before Time. I see their shadows . . . horned and tailed . . . I see their eyes . . . glittering, clear motes, like dew on the leaf . . . I hear them whispering . . . like echoes in a cave . . .