Two blocks later we found Camphire. No, actually, two blocks later we found Camphire’s advance guard, in the form of a grid of chalk lines on the street, the sidewalk, and up the sides of buildings as high as a medium-sized person could reach. Already outlined on the grid were shapes and figures that looked random to me—but if they were random, why grid them first? Then I looked further ahead, and saw the filled-in color that didn’t yet extend to where we stood, and how it made sense of the design. The two blocks ahead of us were filled, walls and street, with chalk-drawn animals, plants, and people elongated, geometricized, and abstracted into a knot-work that was part Celtic, part Aztec. Some of the people were elven, some human; some of the animals were real and some were fantastical. I couldn’t vouch for the plants. It seemed at first as if we couldn’t go any farther without walking on the art. Then I noticed the path that wound through, as non-random as the art itself, calculated to bring you to just the right viewing distance for each major group of figures.

“This must have taken weeks,” Tick-Tick breathed.

“Two and a half to do,” said a sweet, breathy voice behind us. “On paper, though, designing it, that was a couple months. I think. Getting there is half the fun, or maybe it’s that packing takes longer than travelling. One of those things that’s supposed to be broadening, anyway.”

It was Camphire, of course. She was stunningly ordinary to look at: middling height for an elf, collar-length hair dyed brown and tucked untidily behind her peaked ears, eyes more like gray than silver, regular but undistinguished features. There was a smudge of indigo chalk dust on the side of her nose. She wore a T-shirt that was much too large for her, and a wide denim skirt that didn’t seem to have ever been hemmed, and a carpenter’s apron with the pockets full of colored chalks.

“Of course,” she went on, with a not-exactly-focussed-on-anything smile, “a journey of a thousand steps begins with a single mile, unless they’re really small steps. Here,” she said to me, and handed me a length of dark green chalk. “Fill in that stem. Start at the bird’s tail, and don’t do the leaves yet.” She held out a handful of chalks to Tick-Tick. “Over there, that’s a sunflower. Make it whatever color you think sunflowers are.”

“Yellow?” Tick-Tick ventured, not as if she thought it would help. Horticulture isn’t Tick-Tick’s subject, either.

“If you want them to be,” Camphire told her, nodding.

“We’re sort of… in the middle of something,” I said to Camphire.