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erupted on the bank. Water coursing through the channel sizzled into steam. At the same time, the ballymag vanished—along with Hallia and myself.

4: P AINODEATH
    Pine needles! I rolled over and spat them from my mouth. Above, thick branches arched upward, looking sturdy enough to support the sky itself. And burly enough to obscure it: Only a few specks of light shone through the tight weave of limbs.
    “Good work, young hawk.”
    I cringed, spat out a chunk of sticky resin, then turned my head toward Hallia. Like me, she lay on her back among the needles and broken sticks. “All right,” I admitted. “So my Leaping was a little . . . off.”
    She sat up, watching me solemnly. “A little, you say? Seems to me you were trying to send the ballymag, not us. Now we’re here, in some forest, while he’s nowhere in sight! And wasn’t the Haunted Marsh your goal? I should be grateful, I suppose, your aim was so poor!”
    She shook a needle off her nose. “Compared to your aim in Leaping, well, Gwynnia’s aim in landing is superb.” Her expression darkened. “Where is she, anyway?” She bounced to her feet, spraying me with sticks. “Gwyyyniaaa,” she called, her voice flying into the forest like a sparrow hawk. “My Gwyyyniaaa.”
    No answer came. Hallia turned to me, her brow knitted with concern. “Oh, I do hope she’s all right. She’d answer me if she could hear. You don’t think we—”
    “Left her behind?” I finished, pushing myself to my feet. I brushed the bark and needles off my tunic. “It’s possible, I’m afraid. Very possible. I wasn’t, after all, supposed to send her anywhere.”
    “You weren’t supposed to send us, either! Oh, she’ll be horribly upset.” She glanced around the grove. “Maybe she’s here somewhere, just out of earshot.”
    “Wherever here is,” I muttered.
    Tilting my head back, I peered up into the vaulting branches and drew a deep breath of air, poignant with the sweetness of cedar and pine. And something else, I realized: a slight odor of something rancid, or rotting, that lurked just beneath the sweetness. Nonetheless, I drank in the aromas, for as much as I disliked being lost, I always savored being in a forest. The darker the better. For the darker the grove, the older the trees. And the older the trees, the more mysterious, and more wise, I knew them to be.
    A breeze rustled the needled branches, sprinkling my face with dew. Suddenly I thought of another day, in another forest—in the land of Gwynedd, called Wales by some. Pursued by a foe, I had escaped by climbing a tree: a great pine, much like the ones towering above us now. Moments later, I’d found myself caught in a rising storm. The wind swelled, and I clung with all my strength to the tree. When the storm finally arrived in force, I rode out all the swaying and twirling, rocking and twisting, supported—nay, embraced—by those branches. And when, at last, the storm subsided, leaving me drenched in the boughs of that rain-washed tree, I had felt refreshed, revived, and newly born.
    Hallia tapped my arm. Just as I turned to her, another, stronger breeze coursed through the limbs above us. She started to speak, but I raised my hand to stop her. For in the creaking branches of the trees, I heard voices, deep and resonant. Yet . . . these voices did not seem to belong to a forest whose boughs lifted so majestically. They sounded full of despair, and of pain slowly deepening.
    With all my concentration, I listened. The trees cried out to me, their great arms flailing. I could not understand all they said, for they were all speaking at once, sometimes in languages I hadn’t yet mastered. Yet there were several whose words I could not mistake. From a stately cedar: We are dying, dying. From a linden tree whose heart-shaped leaves twirled slowly to the ground: It is eating me. Swallowing my roots, my very roots. And from a powerful pine, in mournful tones: My child! Do not take away my child!
    As the