He seemed to consider. “You are safe for now, but I am going to have to send you back at some point. Although I won’t send you back to where I found you.”

“I’m not anywhere close to where I was, am I? Or even close to the same country?”

“You are nowhere anyone can reach you. The boy Hawk was here once, a long time ago. He walked these gardens, too. He talked with me as I am talking to you. He asked questions of me, and I gave him what answers I could.” He glanced over at her. “Just as I will give you what answers I can.”

They walked side by side for a few minutes, saying nothing, the man and the girl, surrounded by a profusion of colors and smells and a sense of peace. Birds flew past in bright bursts of color, and insects buzzed and hummed from within the cool, shadowed depths of the greenery.

“You saved me from that old man for a reason,” she said, making it a statement of fact.

“That old man is a demon come out of the ruins of the Great Wars, a creature of vast and terrible appetite, a beast with a singular vision. It lives for only one reason—to destroy all those who bear the black staff. It thought for many years that it had done so, that all of them were gone. It wandered the wastelands of the old world, seeking out any it might have missed, without success. There were none to be found. Then, one day, not so long ago, it had a dream of such a bearer—a dream that came to it unbidden and was fostered by its preternatural instincts. It sensed the presence of the Word’s magic and the nature of its source. A man who wielded such magic had ventured outside a valley that had once been hidden and no longer was. It caught a whiff of both, nothing more, but that was enough. The demon knew its hunt was not ended.”

The King of the Silver River gestured toward a stone bench that was settled in a small circular clearing in the middle of the pathway. They walked to the bench and sat down together.

“There were others of its kind once, hunters of Knights of the Word. This demon may be the last. Do you know of the man it hunts? Have you met him?”

She nodded. “His name is Sider Ament. He bears a staff that was carried into my valley homeland five centuries ago by one of two Knights of the Word who came there with my ancestors.”

“Do you know, as well, of your own heritage as a child of the Ghosts, one who was a companion of the boy Hawk and came with him into the valley?”