She hesitated a moment longer, then turned away. “I am coming,” she said to the air, to something only she could hear. Her head lifted slightly. “Good luck, Pen.”

He watched her disappear into the trees, sylphlike, a shadow quickly lost in the changing mix of light and dark, swallowed whole.

“Good luck,” he echoed back, and was alone.

He stood motionless in front of the tanequil for a long time, unsure of where or how to begin, of what to do. The tree would give him one of its branches, if he could find a way to persuade it to do so. The branch could be shaped into something called a darkwand, if he could figure out how. The darkwand would give him access to the Forbidding and allow him to find and retrieve his imprisoned aunt and bring her home again, if he could reach Paranor and pass through the portal created by the potion called liquid night.

If. That word was everywhere. It loomed all about him like an impenetrable wall.

What should he do?

He waited some more, half hoping that the tree would try to communicate with him, that it would take the initiative and show him a way to speak with it. But after standing in front of it for what seemed an interminable amount of time, he gave up hoping. The effort to communicate would have to come from him. He was the supplicant; he was the one who was going to have to find a way to break through.

He had communicated with the aeriads just by speaking aloud. Would that work with the tanequil, as well?

“My name is Penderrin Ohmsford,” he said. “Can you understand what I am saying?”

He felt foolish speaking that way, and he knew as soon as the words were out that there wasn’t going to be any response. The tanequil was different from the aeriads. He was going to have to find a different way of speaking to it.

He walked up to the tree and placed his hands on its bark, running them slowly over the hard, rough surface. He was surprised at the warmth he found there, a pulsating heat that radiated outward to spread through his own body. He kept his hands in place as the heat entered him, thinking that might be the beginning of a way to connect.

But nothing more happened.

He took his hands away, staring upward into the thick nest of intertwined limbs. The orange-tipped leaves shimmered in the moonlight overhead, a rippling that reminded him of a sunset’s glow on the surface of the Rainbow Lake. Rustling sounds emanated from that shimmer, soft and gentle, and he reached for them with his senses, drawing them in, trying to sort them out and make them into words.

But nothing revealed itself.