The aeriads had no time or interest in fear, it seemed. Pen and Cinnaminson started ahead once more, moving into the trees. Night descended, the moon and stars appeared, and the texture of the light changed. Slowly, their vision adjusted, and they were able to see well enough to know how to place their feet. The trees closed about them, towering old-growth giants, age-worn sentinels of that strange place. Pen could almost feel them watching, waiting to see what he and Cinnaminson would do. The forest was deep and still, and it was living. Pen stepped lightly, gingerly, thinking it made a difference where and how he walked. The earth was soft, carpeted with needles, damp and smelling of mulch and rot. He did not hear the sounds of night birds or small animals. He did not see anything move.

–Come–

The aeriads led them with whispered encouragement, leading them through the forest, between the massive old trees, down the ravines and across the ridges, over the rocky outcroppings and around the steep drops. The path was circuitous and unknowable, a thread that no one who hadn’t traveled it many times before could hope to find. Pen could not explain it, but he had the curious feeling that it might not even be possible to travel the same path twice, that it might somehow be different each time. Even though comprised of earth and rock, streams and trees—solid, knowable things—that place felt as if it were ephemeral and ever shifting. There was a changeling quality to it, a mutability that turned it from solid to liquid, from a terrain of the physical to a dreamscape of the mind. Pen had the feeling that it wasn’t a place you could go to if you weren’t a guest of its maker.

It was a place, he thought suddenly, in which the King of the Silver River would feel at home.

He began to hear humming then, soft and insistent. He thought it was the wind at first, weaving through the branches of the trees, vibrating the leaves, but there didn’t seem to be any wind. Then the humming changed to singing, the nature of the words indistinct but the sound clear and compelling.

“Cinnaminson?” he whispered.

She was smiling. “The aeriads are singing, Pen.”

He listened to them, to the strange, echoing voices that seemed to come from both inside and outside his head, rising and falling in regular cadence, the sounds repeating, over and over.

“Can you understand them?” he asked, leaning close and speaking softly, afraid that his voice might do something to disturb the song, might break its spell.

She shook her head. “Isn’t it beautiful? It makes me want to sing with them.”