“You shouldn’t have been Surgebinding so much!” He wound along on the ground beside her, leaving a trail of vines and crystals. “And we should have stayed in the palace. Oh, how did this happen to me? I should be gardening right now. I had the most magnificent chairs.”

“Shars?” Lift asked, pausing.

“Yes, chairs.” Wyndle wound up in a coil beside her, forming a face that tilted toward her at an angle off the top of the coil. “While in Shadesmar, I had collected the most magnificent selection of the souls of chairs from your side! I cultivated them, grew them into grand crystals. I had some Winstels, a nice Shober, quite the collection of spoonbacks, even a throne or two!”

“Yu gurdened shars?”

“Of course I gardened chairs,” Wyndle said. His ribbon of vine leaped off the coil and followed her as she started walking again. “What else would I garden?”

“Fwants.”

“Plants? Well, we have them in Shadesmar, but I’m no pedestrian gardener. I’m an artist! Why, I was planning an entire exhibition of sofas when the Ring chose me for this atrocious duty.”

“Smufld gramitch mragnifude.”

“Would you take that out of your mouth?” Wyndle snapped.

Lift did so.

Wyndle huffed. How a little vine thing huffed, Lift didn’t know. But he did it all the time. “Now, what were you trying to say?”

“Gibberish,” Lift said. “I just wanted to see how you’d respond.” She stuffed the other side of the handkerchief into her mouth and started sucking on it.

They continued on with a sigh from Wyndle, who muttered about gardening and his pathetic life. He certainly was a strange Voidbringer. Come to think of it, she’d never seen him act the least bit interested in consuming someone’s soul. Maybe he was a vegetarian?

They passed through a small forest, really just a corpse of trees, which was a strange term, since she never seemed to find any bodies in them. These weren’t even drop-deads; those tended to grow in small patches, but each apart from the others. These had branches that wound around one another as they grew, dense and intertwined to face the highstorms.

That was basically the way to do it, right? Everyone else, they wound their branches together. Braced themselves. But Lift, she was a drop-dead. Don’t intertwine, don’t get caught up. Go your own way.

Yes, that was definitely how she was. That was why she’d had to leave the palace, obviously. You couldn’t live your life getting up and seeing the same things every day. You had to keep moving, otherwise people started to know who you were, and then they started to expect things from you. It was one step from there to being gobbled up.

She stopped right inside the trees, standing on a pathway that someone had cut and kept maintained. She looked backward, northward, toward Azir.