The owls had fallen silent this night, and twice Gaborn had seen huge harts bounding through the trees, shaking their great antlers from side to side as if prepared to fight.

Off to his right, the armies marched. A feeling pervaded the forest, like the electric thrill of a brewing storm.

For long hours, Gaborn rode through the trees, a heaviness growing in his heart, a drowsiness fogging his mind. It was a sweet, organic tiredness—like that brought on by mulled wine while one sits beside a fire, or like the drugged sleep induced by an herbalist’s concoction of poppy petals.

Gaborn’s eyelids began to feel weighty. He half-dozed as he rode up a ridge, around a peak, and back down into a valley, where brambles and limbs blocked his every path.

He became angry, drew his saber, and considered hacking his way through the trees, but stopped when he heard curses just ahead, and the sound of someone else, a man in armor, hacking through the same copse.

Almost too late he recognized the source of the danger. Somehow he’d turned around in his ride.

The trees. He wondered if they had led him to danger.

In the shadowed woods, Gaborn stopped. He glimpsed one of Raj Ahten’s patrols. A dozen scouts hacked a path through the brush, while Gaborn held perfectly still.

They passed in the darkness. Gaborn feared even to breathe.

He reined in his horse, hard, and inhaled deeply. For long moments he tried to focus his thoughts. No harm, he wanted to say to the woods. I mean you no harm.

It required all his will to merely sit ahorse, to keep from riding headlong toward destruction. Sweat broke out on Gaborn’s forehead, his hands trembled, and his breathing came ragged.

I am your friend, he wanted to say. Feel me. Test me. For long moments, he tried to open himself, his mind and heart, to communicate to the wood.

He felt the tendrils of thought move slowly, seeking him, grasping him as a root might grasp a stone. He could feel their ponderous power.

The trees seized him, infiltrated every portion of his mind. Memories and childhood fears began to flash before Gaborn’s eyes—unwanted bits of dreams and adolescent fantasies. Every hope and deed and desire.

Then, just as slowly, the seeking tendrils began to withdraw.

“Bear me no malice,” Gaborn whispered to the trees when at last he could speak. “Your enemies are my enemies. Let me pass safely, that I may defeat them.”

After many long heartbeats, the heaviness around him seemed to ease. Gaborn let his mind drift and dream, though with his stamina he needed no sleep.

He thought upon the thing that had brought him north, his desire to see Iome Sylvarresta.