He made a face. “I’m sorry. You do look tired. We’re almost home. Look at that! Look!”

He gestured westward with a grand sweep of his arm. From atop the ridge, they had a magnificent view over the lowlands: the imperial road cutting straight across the countryside, the river looping and curving, fields and woodland and hawks gliding over autumn-gold meadows while ponds and irrigation canals gleamed under the morning sun.

Orledder Halt was always the first thing Elen really focused on, because of its distinctive shape, easy to discern from this height and at this distance. The elevated road split into two roads that curved outward and, after about a mile, converged back into a single road. This split created an island of ground, a “halt” for travelers, protected by the road from Pall and Spore alike.

The lively Sul River passed beneath the split roads via culverts, flowed through the Halt as its main source of water, and wound away into the southwest where eventually its waters would flow on through East Latch Pall and Sunset Province all the way to the western ocean.

Up here on the lookout they were too far away to pick out individual streets or houses, but the solidity of the Halt’s dense buildings was a welcome sight. They were almost home.

Beyond the Halt, fields clustered close on either side of the elevated roadway and grew sparser the more distant those fields were from the safety of the road. The locals had begun to push their fields and orchards farther out with each passing year. There were more mouths to feed and less Spore to disrupt people’s lives, to remind them of the danger. Soon they began to believe the danger wasn’t real.

Elen didn’t look forward to writing her incident report for the intendant, in triplicate—one for Orledder Halt’s archive, one for the provincial governor’s archive at Ilvewind Cross, and one for the palace archives. Was the Spore related to the appearance of the haunt? She didn’t think so. Such a mushroom growth would have been slumbering in the ground for months before breaking out into the living sedge. But what had triggered the irruption? Maybe she had it the wrong way round. What if the haunt had appeared because an irruption so close to the Spires had disturbed its mysterious slumber?

“Look!” Kem tugged on her arm. “Look! What is that, coming up behind the caravan?”

She removed her spyglass from her pack. From this distance, she saw the caravan as a column of tiny vehicles moving north on the road, but no detail. She set the scope to her eye and adjusted its lens. The road sprang closer.

“What do you see? What do you see?”