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“Don’t I get a say in this?” Innocence asked.

“No,” was Alfhild’s matter-of-fact answer.

“You are a hostage prince,” said the earl, not unkindly, “but you lack a country, and there is no one to ransom you. Prepare a feast!”

Innocence got no more answers from Earl Morksol, and in the midst of the hidden folk’s sudden rushing about and bellowing about icemeat and frothfish and shroombread and sweetgreens, he paradoxically found himself alone in the chaos. Even Alfhild ignored him, though her friends provided him with new peasant garb to slip over his nightclothes—white shirt and stockings, red vest, black pants, and shoes—before they too danced away in the general bustle.

They truly thought him incapable of escape. Maybe they were right. He shivered, a captive guest abducted in the dark of the morn. Would Nan and Freidar try to rescue him? Had they any notion how?

He shuffled into a corner framed by an empty suit of glass armor and a tapestry depicting a bizarre assortment of uldra forging a huge magic axe. He couldn’t hope for outside escape. His guardians were helpful, but they were mortal. He needed Deadfall now, but there’d been no word of the magic carpet in all his time in Fiskegard.

Nevertheless he was supposed to have power. Earl Morksol confirmed it. It seemed unfair to be captured over a power he had no ability to use.

He grappled with his own panic, seized that feeling of unfairness, and envisioned it as an axe driven through the flesh of reality.

I am Innocence Gaunt! Chosen of the chi of the Heavenwalls! I have escaped from the Scroll of Years, the Karvaks, and the moon! Even in this mad place, I am who I am!

Where before, on Fiskegard, there was no response to his plea, here in Sølvlyss the castle rumbled and shook. Innocence felt a tingling in his skin. He did not know how to control his power, but the land responded.

He smiled.

Now the gyrating indifference of the uldra ceased, and the simply dressed nobles and beautifully garbed servants stared at him. The glass armor next to him swiveled and brought a sword to bear; for it had been inhabited the whole time by one of the translucent folk. Innocence had been too preoccupied to notice.

Innocence remembered his training. He slipped close to the glass knight, inside the reach of the sword, in the maneuver known as Sly Fox. Immediately he pivoted to perform Pinching Lobster upon the sword-arm, while employing the Grass-Cutter Kick to topple the uldra, who went down in a clatter. Innocence yanked the tapestry from the wall and covered the knight. He fled for the gate.

“How can you leave me?” demanded Alfhild, the earl’s daughter. “After all we’ve been through together!”

“Delightful!” Innocence yelled back, nearly losing his balance on the sharp-edged moat bridge. “But I think it’s too early for betrothals!” Two more glass knights stomped over from the far side, and Earl Morksol and Alfhild advanced from the nearer. He looked down at the moat and saw its waters surging as though he beheld wavetops of the deepest sea.

“You ate from my hand,” said Alfhild. “It might be too early for betrothals, but it is too late for escape.”

“To eat of our food,” said Earl Morksol, “is to partake of our reality. You cannot leave.”

“It was only a morsel,” Innocence protested.

“To eat is to eat,” said the earl.

“Enough,” said Alfhild, advancing, enraged. She was no longer quite so fetching. “I will slap the mischief from you, boy.”

Her words unlocked something within him. Like a song heard from far over the hills, he remembered being very small, and his mother telling him stories. In one of them, the daughter of the Earthe itself was trapped in an underworld, bringing her mother into a despairing winter. The daughter might have escaped for good, but she’d unthinkingly eaten a few pomegranate seeds underground. She must always return for part of the year, and thus the world had to endure the cold for a time.

But she had escaped.

If they were so sure they had him, he wondered, why were they so set on serving him a feast?

Innocence called out, “I will return to my world, even as will the spring.” He leapt.

Entering the moat was like resuming his plunge from the moon into the sea. He sputtered and struggled for breath.

“You must do the honorable thing!” Morksol called down. “Does it not say in your Swan scripture that to look upon a woman with desire is morally the same as having relations with her? You have looked upon my daughter, eaten from her fingertips. You belong to her.”

It’s not my Swan scripture, Innocence thought, and found the strength to swim. He thought of the sage of Qiangguo who said, “Only one of virtue truly has the discernment to love and hate people for who they are.” He might not be a man of virtue, but he had reason to hate, not love, his captors. Anger urged him on. He might be commencing manhood, but it would be in his own time, on his own terms.

He’d noticed that this ocean-like stream did not fully envelop the castle of Sølvlyss but had a horseshoe shape, emerging from and returning to the walls of the great cavern. And it was his hunch that it was easier to cross from this place to his own world at the cavern edges. Otherwise why wouldn’t Alfhild’s passageway have led directly to her father’s castle?

Of course, by the same reasoning, if this border had led to Fiskegard, Alfhild would have used it. He’d probably not be returning to the Pickled Rat. No help for it.

He swam, throwing his full strength into the act, and at last reached a place where the water surged into the rock. He sensed glass knights upon the nearby shore. The current carried him into a small cave, where it battered him against an opening he could not pass. He called upon the power in him, this time not with language but with wordless rage. He stretched out his arms and shoved, willing the structure of the place to shatter.

The land shook. With desperate fury he found words. He called upon all the gods and holy ones he could think of, the Swan, Torden, the Painter of Clouds, the Celestial Emperor, the Undetermined. He murmured the name of Joy.

He screamed for his mother.

Through the rumble of an earthquake, he heard other screams as well. Above all the wailing rose the voice of Earl Morksol. “Very well! I will not accept the damage you will wreak within Sølvlyss! If you must escape down this path, escape you will! But you may find captivity was far more pleasant, young fool!”

There was a sensation as of wrestling with a fierce opponent who suddenly quits the match.

Innocence plunged into a strange darkness. Disorientation snuffed his consciousness.

When he came to, he lay soaked in his uldra-given garb beside a gigantic gray boulder, a solitary feature upon a wide brown plain of scrubland that looked nothing like either Sølvlyss or Fiskegard. Hills gave way to mountains in the distance, palomino with white snow and dark rock. A deep blue sky was similarly divided by swirls of white cloud. The wind moaned. He rose. All the feeling of power had fled him, and he leaned against the boulder, shivering, spent. He did not know where he was, when it was, or even what size he was. He could be sure of only two things.

He was his own master. And if he could not find shelter soon, he would shortly freeze to death.

CHAPTER 3

RUNEMARK

At first
Al-Saqr
raced over the lands tributary to Amberhorn and beyond into woodland borderlands of walled towns and chieftains, neither commanded by the mighty Eldshore nor the nomads of the Wheelgreen. Even with the need to zig and zag to avoid mountains and pursuit, progress was far swifter than a similar journey on foot. Yet to Gaunt it felt as though all the world crowded between them and Innocence.

On the evening of the first full day after Amberhorn, when it was clear they’d evaded the city’s wrath, Gaunt joined Bone in entering the world of the Scroll of Years. Gaunt took the scroll from Snow Pine and put her hand upon Bone’s.

“Say hello for me,” A-Girl-Is-A-Joy said.

“You only emerged this morning,” Gaunt said.

“But it’s not the same morning for them.”

Gaunt let the painting’s power pull them inside, and the gondola of
Al-Saqr
vanished.

In the world of the scroll it was a misty daytime, not a clear rosy evening. Spindly mountains rose out of a sea of white cloud, and amid the gnarled trees of one such mountain stood the pagoda of a nameless monastery of the philosophy—or religion, or society—called the Forest. Gaunt and Bone drifted hand in hand, like two falling leaves whose stems were accidentally intertwined, until they settled onto a wide ledge beside a mountain path. A trio of leaning trees, stretching their branches into the abyss, protected them from falling into the fog. Trees on nearby mountains stretched similarly, as though beckoning.

“He is waiting,” said a voice.

The speaker appeared to be a big, gray-haired man from Qiangguo dressed in a birch bark hat; a stained, tattered robe; and wooden shoes. He had the look of someone who spent many days out of doors, and probably some nights as well. As ever he looked familiar and not. While his body looked much as Gaunt had known it, his eyes always looked as though they’d seen lifetimes pass between visits.

“Hello, Sage Painter,” Gaunt said. Bone waved.

“Ah, that title belongs to one long dead,” came the rumbling voice, speaking as though repeating music heard from a far-off peak. “What is the use of it? I am but his self-portrait.”

“You are welcome company, friend,” Bone said, “whatever you are.”

“Indeed, it’s good to see you,” Gaunt said.

“Strange. You are each so shaped by the other. Yet until now I don’t think I’ve ever encountered you on the same path.”

Bone looked at Gaunt; she took his hand and smiled. It occurred to her he’d spent considerable time within the scroll while it lay lost in a mountain valley. “We do keep busy,” Bone said. “So Walking Stick’s expecting us, eh?”

“Every life has its know-it-alls, and you go now to meet one. You will find him at the top of the pagoda. Everything is up and down, right and wrong, with that one. Meantime my way lies rambling in the woods and shadows, far from trouble.”

Gaunt said, “You will not join us?”

Bone said, “Surely he is still not so bad?”

“My words are all bird-chirps to him, and I don’t speak his language.” He clapped and chuckled. “But the mountain is large.” He sighed, though his eyes retained their bright mischief. “Even so, I wish I might look at the outer world from your flying craft, see the land stretch far below, no kitchen smoke for many
li
, unknown mountains and waterfalls, cries of monkeys and roars of tigers.”

“I wish there was a way to arrange it,” Gaunt said. “But if we see you later I’ll tell you all about the land.”

“I would like that, poet. And now crazy Meteor-Plum walks his tangled way. And tangled Gaunt and Bone walk their crazy way. Farewell!”

They watched him descend the mountain path. In an unnervingly short time, he was a tiny figure. Gaunt wondered about his musings.
Al-Saqr
did get visitors from the scroll. If one wished to see the wider world, the view from a balloon offered a fine opportunity. Many of the monks accepted the invitation, though many others, including their leader Leaftooth, declined. Gaunt wondered if some of the monks were, like the self-portrait of the Sage Painter who’d created the scroll, aspects of the scroll itself and unable to leave. If so, she thought it might be impertinent to say so.

One individual who was decidedly not an aspect of the scroll was Walking Stick.

“Well, Bone, our crazy way beckons. Shall we?”

“Doesn’t it ever. Let’s!”

It was often bright and sunny here, but always cold, especially when the wind picked up. The path bore into shadow and out into sun, making rough lurches and plunges into icy streams. Birds conducted their endless conversations about territory, mates, bugs, and humans. More and more, wind slapped the visitors until they lost the cover of trees and beheld a monastery sheltered and perforated by a hardy grove, framed by neighboring mountains, backed by distant mountains, embellished by remote mountains.

They were welcomed by a monk and taken upstairs for tea. Walking Stick sat cross-legged in the midst of what could have been considered a solarium, except that rather than windows the chamber had crumbled portions of wall. Mountains and mists stretched in every direction.

“Ah, good,” he said, rising. “Now that we can speak at our ease—”

Gaunt slapped him. Before that moment she wasn’t certain what she would do. She might have spat. She might have laughed. The move was so sudden even Bone was surprised. Walking Stick surely could have blocked or evaded, but his only reaction was to narrow his eyes.

Gaunt folded her arms. “That is for my son. If you hadn’t tried to abduct me when I was pregnant, none of this would have happened.”

Walking Stick took a deep breath before answering. “You speak truly. Yet worse things might have happened.”

“Such are the apologies of Walking Stick.”

Bone said, “He has paid, in a way. He has been stuck in the scroll, unable to resume his former life.”

“I dedicated myself to the education of your son,” Walking Stick said.

“Taught him,” Gaunt said, “in the manner of your Garden.”

“Why would I not give him the best?” Walking Stick gestured toward one of the walls’ ruined sections. “However, if it reassures you, know that the monks of the Forest have also instructed him. They have a . . . different approach.”

Gaunt looked out at swirling clouds. She sighed. “I never thought I would say so, but perhaps it is not entirely bad you were exiled with him. He was left with few friends.”

Bone said nothing.

Walking Stick bowed. “I fear he would not consider me one such. Yet I tried to make him an honorable man.”

“I suppose he couldn’t follow me in everything,” Bone said.

“You may joke about your larcenous ways, Imago Bone. But I do hope for better for your son.”

“You mean, you still hope to make him emperor of Qiangguo.”

Walking Stick said, “That was long ago, from my perspective. I have dwelled with monks of the Forest. Some of their mad philosophy may be rubbing off. If Innocence Gaunt rejects the power of Qiangguo, so be it. Yet I hope to persuade him it’s yet a worthy goal, to cherish and protect the greatest of the world’s lands.”