The Queen counted every sway of her carriage as her road curved among the dunes. Before long, she heard Crayn call to her coachman. At once, the carriage slowed. While she waited at the door, the coachman drew his horses to a gentle halt. As the carriage settled on its springs, she discarded decorum. Without waiting for a step-stool, she thrust open the door and jumped down to the road.

After sitting so long, her muscles were not prepared for the jolt of landing on hard stone. Awkward as a child, she fell to her hands and knees. But she staggered upright before Crayn could dismount to help her.

With his familiar discretion, the Commander did not ask if she was hurt. When he reached her side, he merely touched her arm to assure her of his support.

She was hurt. She had bruised her knees, scraped her hands. But those pains were too petty to distract her. Beyond her carriage, she saw the bridge at last.

For a moment, she could only stare. This close to the mountains where it began, the rift made by the Line River’s swift turbulence was a true chasm: deeper than the Cut where the river split the rising ground toward the sea, but not as wide. Still, its width made the very idea of a bridge seem implausible. Estie could not have thrown a rock across the cleft.

Nevertheless the bridge was there, a high, graceful arch both broad and gradual enough to carry even the largest of Set Ungabwey’s wagons comfortably, and footed on granite well away from each rim. When the Queen had commanded her people to devise a crossing, she had imagined a wooden construct secured by bands of iron. At her weakest, in her lonely bed at night, she had feared that her workmen would face an almost unsurmountable task, one that would require seasons or years to complete.

The theurgists who had made this bridge had worked with blocks of stone the size of her carriage. And along each side, they had devised a retaining wall to keep people, horses, and conveyances from plunging into the chasm. Such a span should have collapsed long ago, broken by its own appalling weight.

Power on that scale, enough to hold those blocks in place until they were all fitted snugly against each other, and then to seal them so that they would endure— The immensity of what had been accomplished here left Estie gaping.

As she scanned the arch, however, hardly able to absorb what she was seeing, her gaze was drawn to its crest.

A woman clad in white sat her horse there, watching Estie; waiting for the Queen to gather her scattered wits. The devotee sat her mount with the assurance of a woman who knew in her bones that no mere shudder of the earth would cause the bridge to fall.