By midday, they had come in sight of the bluffs on which Arborlon was settled. They could see Elves walking the heights and smell the smoke from the cooking fires. The day had gone warm and the wind still, and there was a sultry feel to the air.

Panterra brought them to a halt. “This is probably close enough,” he advised Prue, speaking to her out of Bonnasaint’s hearing. “Can you wait here with him while I find the Orullians?”

“I can,” she replied. “But I don’t think that’s the best plan. You should be the one who stays. I’ll have a better chance of wandering about as a blind girl. Someone might recognize Sider’s staff, and I don’t think you want that just yet.”

He saw the wisdom in her suggestion and reluctantly agreed. He didn’t like letting her out of his sight, now that he had found her again. But that was selfish thinking, so he abandoned it. “Go,” he said.

Leaving her backpack behind, she set out for the city. Pan took Bonnasaint into the trees, tethered him to one with the rope, dropped his own backpack beside Prue’s, and sat down to wait. The day eased past noontime and into the early afternoon, a slow, lazy passage that made him drowsy as he sat watching his prisoner and thinking of Prue. But he knew how not to fall asleep when on watch, and soon it was the assassin who was sleeping, his head drooping and his snores audible in the silence of the woods. Pan kept an eye out for Elves, as well, but none of them had reason to venture this far afield and none came close to where he waited.

Prue was right about things changing and never going back to the way they were. He hadn’t taken time to think about it before, but he did so now. They might not even be living in the valley when this was over. They might be somewhere else entirely. Would they even be together? Could he keep her with him when he carried the black staff and the burden of responsibility that bearing it entailed? He tried to see the future—any future—but it was hazy and out of reach. Too much blocked his vision of what might be. Too many uncertainties made it impossible to think it through clearly.

He was staring into space, seeing nothing, when Bonnasaint spoke. “This isn’t going to end well for you,” he said, suddenly awake. “You know that, don’t you?”

Maybe he had been faking sleep all along to see if Pan would drop his guard. The boy couldn’t tell. “Let me worry about that.”