“Interesting lady, don’t you think?” Kile said, as if this sort of thing happened all the time, but in this instance, the encounter was particularly entertaining.

“More like frustrating beyond all reason.” Farilane stood, hands on hips, frowning into the fog.

“She’s doing this to us.” Sheldon was looking into the fog while rubbing his arms and bouncing slightly on his feet as if he needed to urinate. “This is all magic. Some sort of mystic magic. That’s why they call this the Mystic Wood. She’s the mystic.”

“There’s no such thing as magic,” Farilane declared, and both men stared at her. Sheldon, she expected. Kile was the surprise. “You believe in magic, Kile?”

“Of course.” His tone was so accepting, as if she were making a joke.

Farilane sighed and drooped her head. “So I suppose you also believe in the gods, and other assorted fairytales?”

He rolled his eyes. “Spoken that way, you’d make anything sound silly.”

“But magic? Seriously?” The princess dropped her pack on the ground and loosened the toggles from their loops.

“The problem, I suspect, lies in the word,” Kile told her. “To you, magic apparently means something that is impossible.”

Farilane opened her satchel and searched for her spare undertunic, nodding as she did. “And to you?”

“It means something not readily understood, like reading. Those who don’t understand it consider it magic.”

“But reading isn’t magic. Anyone who thinks so is merely ignorant of facts.”

“You don’t consider reading to be mystical because you understand it, and in your mind, magic is impossible. Therefore, reading can’t be magic. But now consider this path we’ve been following. It makes no sense, does it? It is, therefore, something that shouldn’t be—at least as far as our understanding allows. But since it exists, that makes it magic.”

“Or maybe it’s simply something we don’t yet understand.” She used the tunic to wipe sweat from her face. The day was warm, and her little sprint after the Green-Clad One had left her with stinging rivulets running into her eyes. “And if we do learn the how and why of this path, does it then stop being magic?”

“To us, yes.” Kile said this with a pleasant smile, as if they were together in a cozy room sipping chilled tremble nectar, discussing philosophy, and waiting on dinner.

Farilane shook her head and jammed the tunic back in the pack. “See, that’s where you lose me. Something either is, or it isn’t. A bird is always a bird. A tree doesn’t change its fundamental reality because we understand it better.”

“Everything changes, Your Highness. In time, everything becomes something else, and that includes birds and trees.”

“But that’s the result of time, not understanding.”