Time-lost on the eastern bank of the Cheyth, the company knelt first at the cold clean water to wash the night's work from their skins — the blood, the ash, the paint from their strange costumes they had worn for the strange play under the full moon. Inayin found that no washing would mend his eyes: they wept red still, a slow blood-weeping from each duct that would not stop. Before they left the bank, Ineia took up a small stone from the river and pocketed it (without explaining why she had done so). Their smiling friend was eager to be gone — not for the road's sake, but because he had no wish to spend a night so near the cursed isle, where she would not be glad of what they had done. Upon being asked, Thargash admitted that there was one across the river they could go to for help, one "Tengelbur, Lord of the Road" but he lay a week to the west, the wrong way entirely, and Thargash refused to go and meet him in any case. Where was he from?
"An era which no longer exists; it is hardly to the point." So they struck a bargain: they would travel together East, but would go slowly enough that Inayin might heal as they walked. And as they walked, Inayin told them the whole story about what had happened to him in the Spring: the silver-haired woman at the forge, the lock of her hair knotted to his belt that no blade nor hand could free; his grandfather's pact in the under-waters with the primordial serpent; the dark blade that hungers for serpents and for men alike; the hunt for the gold-horned king of beasts and the test he had passed, or failed; and the doom laid upon him: to break his blood's curse, or to doom all the North.
From there, our companions traveled east, following the road where it led into a wood. But where the Serth Hatama should have stood grey and petrified, there rose Feiparojar, the Star-Wood, green from the roots to the sky, its great trees half of living stone, birdsong threaded with a far high harping, the very air tasting of rain and starlight; and each of them knew the place, though none had seen it in waking memory. Ineia foraged for herbs as they went, gathering a small luminous lotus, ancient mother of the sacred lotus, lifted still living from the wet earth. And in a glade they came upon the Star-folk themselves — six tall hunters in bronze, dark and fair beyond any people the company had known, who hailed them as kin and took them for wood-folk out of Orusena. Their leader named himself Ralarkh; though Fjalenar and Thargash were the only members of the party able to speak with them in the ancient tongue of Starland. A young huntress crushed a sprig of living amber — Amber-Heart, drawn from trees that stand by ancient springs — into Inayin's wounds, and they closed in a breath. But when she bent to his weeping eyes she drew back grey-faced: this was no hurt of the body but of the soul, a corruption past her power, and for it they must seek the star-priest Afālnela at Amirukarr. The hunters spoke warmly, too, of the Giver — a star of great power come to restore the Star-folk's lost craft, his marvels already spreading across the Hills of Jade — and the company kept their faces still, for they knew that fair name for what it was: Orkon, in the first hour of his seduction. This at last was some clue as to when they had arrived.
Off the road, herb-gathering, they lost the road. Days folded over them in that wood, and its beauty turned slowly to a snare — for it was enchanted still, and more than one of them felt the pull to simply stay, to let the world they knew go and dwell there always. A woman's voice came singing through the trees, sweet and half-familiar; and because they were not altogether fools in a magic wood, they did not follow it. At last Talari, hoping to get a sense of their location, climbed one of the great trees, but even from that vantage she could not see the road, only trees stretching every horizon, and in the east a far river snaking east beneath high hills — and nearer, in a broken bowl of the land, a ruin old grey stones jutting through the moss, a scant two hours to the north-east.
The stones were a forge — a Water-Steel forge, ancient and open to the sky and somehow living yet, and Inayin knew its hearth, for he had stood at these same stones in his own age, when only the central hearth remained. By the lip of its pool sat a young woman, tall, dark-haired, her every motion a kind of grace, trying and failing to finish a song. She turned, startled — and Inayin knew her face past all doubt. She greeted them in the old tongue; Fjalenar answered in the high courtly register (which is the only way he knew to speak a language he had only ever encountered in ancient courtly poetry) and accidentally spoke to her as a man who intends to woo. That is how she took it, before he could explain that they were merely lost. Her name, she said, was Kanle — though her friends call her Panathfei — a smith come a long way alone to keep this forge and to coax from the shades of the Stone Kings their lost secrets of craft; only a few centuries old, and still, she said, learning patience. She bade them warm themselves at her fire and rest. But one thing, she told them: they must by no means enter the waters when night falls. Why?
The serpent.
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