March 28, 2026 — 1:39 am

Isra stalked through the woods, feeling slightly peeved about the whole thing.

Logically, it made sense for her to be in among the natural world, which was her domain, but she felt envious of the others, particularly of Verity, who got to go to the large mountain palace. Isra liked people, she liked magic, and she was being asked to go out into the woods and speak to birds. This was, yes, her specialty, but Isra thought of herself more as a druid by circumstance rather than a druid by vocation.

“Birds!” she called out. “Come!”

She was, she could admit, feeling a bit surly, and decided that she wasn’t going to take it out on the birds, who had mostly been minding their own business.

They descended down on her position, landing on the trees around her, filling the branches in a way that she supposed other people might find frightening. She took stock of them, mostly tiny owls and relatively uninteresting small birds, though a few that had long necks — river birds — and those with colorful plumage that was a bit surprising in a boreal forest.

Isra had a good amount of reach, but it was easier to deal with the birds when they were close to her, in range of her voice. It was the old way of doing things, which she felt only a mild nostalgia for, and she was leveraging it here for the increased power.

“I need you all to be my eyes,” she said. “Tell me the secrets of these lands, from edge to edge, and the Wildlands beyond, if you can cross the border.” She had no idea whether they could, or whether they could come back. “Be cautious in your approach, as though seeking insects you don’t wish to startle. Report any conversations of interest in the village or the palace. Don’t go to places that are unfamiliar to you. Now go, and return here in a few hours.”

It was straining the limits of what a bird could actually keep in mind, but she hoped that they would err on the side of not being obvious. It was in a bird’s nature to stay hidden though, and also in their nature to be curious, so she didn’t think she was asking too much of them.

They flew off, not quite as one, some of them flocking but most of them going in ones and twos. She was controlling them, in a sense, putting herself into them, as she now understood being a druid, but there were so many that she lost a few of the threads immediately.

Isra found a patch of springy moss and laid down, sprawling herself out. She was going to spend the day listening to the birds, watching through their eyes, and not doing a whole lot else. They were playing at being spies, albeit ones with no training (and a reset to back them up if things went wrong).

The threads to the birds were lost one by one, which was somewhat expected. There had been too many of them to hold onto all of them at once, and where in the past she might have said that certain birds didn’t have the disposition to follow instructions, she thought of it differently now. It was, in some ways, a worse version of the same relationship with the world. A part of her wished that she could have some of that old naivete back.

The finches were the swiftest of the birds, and they reached the village before any of the others, perching themselves at windows and doorways, which felt conspicuous to Isra, but which she couldn’t change without pushing quite a bit of herself into them. Listening was easy though, so she listened.

Isra had traveled quite a bit, by her own estimation, not just to Dondrian but all over Greater Plenarch, and she’d decided that at least in Inter, people were mostly the same. They ate, they slept, they wanted companionship and gossip, but that wasn’t bound to be much different because they were in a living demiplane rather than out in the world. As she watched, she found a bit of hesitancy to these people, an uncomfortability that she thought matched what she’d felt for so many years in Pucklechurch. She honed in on that, trying to get a sense of it.

A girl moved through the village, looking awkward, staring at everything, backing up slightly whenever anyone came near. She was trying to see how everyone else was doing things, how close they stood to each other, what they were wearing, how they were talking, all kinds of other small things that people didn’t pay attention to when they felt at home in a place. It was something that Isra saw a lot of, as she looked around with a hundred eyes. People had been thrust into a new community with only relatively few of them having been there for longer than a few months, and they were all feeling each other out. Some would probably do what Isra did, and stubbornly do their own thing, trying to live with the feeling of being out of place, but maybe they would make up their own rules for how things would go.

Isra focused on one conversation between two girls that had apparently grown comfortable with each other.

“There was this old woman who offered to find me a husband,” said one of the girls with a little laugh. Isra detected some nervousness there. “I don’t know if that’s what she did before, but she felt like maybe the younger people could use some help, I guess.”

“I guess that’s interesting,” said the other girl. She was notably short, with darker skin and hair that had been dyed pink. “I’m not sure that I would want that kind of deal though. I mean, the sort of person who would agree to that?”

“Yeah?” asked the other girl. She was taller, lanky, with white skin that was a bit sunburnt, maybe because she had her shoulders exposed. “I said maybe.”

“I guess it’s not that weird,” said the pink-haired girl. “Only a little weird. Like do you just roll with it? Decide that whatever, it’s workable with whomever? I think that would be scary.”

“We left it all behind,” said the taller girl. “Compared to that, being put together with someone seems like peanuts.” She shrugged. “Anyway, it was just a maybe, I don’t know if she’ll figure anything out, and I can always just say ‘no’.”

There was some awkwardness to the conversation, and maybe Isra was reading into things, but it seemed like the pink-haired girl was feeling some attraction.

Isra shifted her attention to two older people, who were apparently married, working together baking bread.

“Feels odd, to be among these disconnected people,” she said. “So many singletons. I hadn’t thought it would be like that.”

“What did you think it would be like?” asked the man as he kneaded a large batch of dough.

“I don’t quite know,” replied the woman. “More like us, I guess.” She was frowning. “More couples. More families. More children. Sometimes things go wrong for a family, don’t they?”

“Often do,” replied the man.

“So I’d think that you’d see more people like, well, us,” said the woman. “Families.”

“Harder to pick, I’d expect,” said the man. “More roots.”

“Do you think we’d have come, if we’d known that it would be like this?” asked the woman.

“I suppose so,” replied the man. He was looking at a cup of flour with a frown on his face. “There will be families, with time. People will get together.”

“You’re right,” said the woman. “Of course you’re right. It just feels like we’re outsiders, and that’s one of the things we were trying to get away from.”

“They like our bread,” said the man.

“True, they do that,” said the woman.

“I wouldn’t rush to call us outsiders,” said the man. “It’s like baking. You have to give it time.”

Isra turned away from them. They seemed like nice people. It didn’t seem good to leave your home and the people who might be depending on you, but she could understand it in some circumstances, and whatever their circumstances had been, she was willing to cut them some slack.

She was looking for a new conversation to listen in on, hoping that it would be about something that would let them nail Cate to the wall, rather than semi-private things she had no business or interest in listening to. Before she could find one though, she became aware of someone moving through the forest. Moving toward her. She turned to look at him with birds’ eyes, curious, though he didn’t look much like a threat.

He had the dark skin common in Tarbin, though it was difficult to say where he was from, as Isra had almost no way to tell the ethnicities of the eastern continent apart. He dressed like he was from Inter though, a shirt with a vest and long pants, the buttons in the shirt undone to show a bit of his chest. He had curled, unruly hair, and a wispy mustache that she found herself paying a bit too much attention to. It didn’t look good, but he wore it with confidence anyway, and that was attractive enough to make up for how it looked. He was older than her, she thought, though not by all that much.

She waited for him to come, trying not to be too obvious about the animals. They turned to look at him of their own accord, some of them doing the particularly characteristic prey response of watching him while pretending that they were just going about their business. For his part, he seemed oblivious, but it was possible this was the very same obliviousness that the animals feigned.

He walked straight up to her. He had known where she was. She stayed resting up against the tree on her soft patch of moss, pretending that she hadn’t known he was coming. She had a temptation to speak into the party channel, just for the sake of letting them know, but she was certain that she could handle the mysterious stranger on her own.

“Hallo,” he said, accent hard to place. “How do you do?” He had stopped fifty feet away from her, a respectful and non-threatening distance.

“Just fine,” said Isra. She stood up from the moss and then sat right back down again, against a tree. “Nice weather.”

“Mmm,” he said. “Sorry for the intrusion.”

“No bother,” she replied. She was playing it cool, which came easily to her, but she was unnerved by this young man, and had no particular idea what he was doing out in the woods, nor how he had found her. She wondered whether she was supposed to know who he was, but Verity hadn’t mentioned anything, and they had all been through at least part of the day before, per Ria.

“How are you finding the forest?” he asked.

“It’s … familiar,” replied Isra. “Boring, honestly.”

“Boring?” he asked. There was some of the same hesitancy to him, which made her feel better.

“It’s a boreal forest,” said Isra. “Most of the trees and plants are the same. There are flowers I’ve never seen before, and trees that we don’t have, but it’s not any different than home in most ways.” She had seen a lot of central Inter, and the forests had a lot of variety to them, but not as much as she had hoped.

“You’re disappointed?” he asked.

“I had thought that coming all this way, I might see something more … interesting,” said Isra. “In the north, in Dondrian, there are trees whose roots descend down from their branches into the sandy soil. The forests are different there, filled with other animals. This is just like the sort of place I left.”

“You could try the Wildlands,” he replied. “They have something different.”

Isra tensed slightly, as she’d realized something that hadn’t been obvious until that point: the man had a mouse in his vest pocket. It was asleep, or nearly so, which was how she’d missed it, but their conversation seemed to be stirring it.

“Well, I’m sure they do,” said Isra. “But I did some dungeons before this, and they weren’t really to my liking.”

“It’s not at all like a dungeon,” said the man. “You should try it, you might like it. I could take you, if you’d like. You’d be safe with me.” He gave her a grin. She hoped that wasn’t what this was, though there was something about him that didn’t exactly make her shrink back.

Isra rolled her eyes. “I’d be plenty safe by myself.”

“There are dangerous things out there,” he said. “Especially once you get far from the palace.”

“No dungeon madness though, or that’s what I heard,” said Isra.

“A creature doesn’t need to be dungeon mad to attack,” he replied. “And there are other threats, bigger than in a dungeon.”

“Mmm,” said Isra. She still didn’t know how he’d so unerringly found her. “And who are you, that you can protect me?” He didn’t look particularly muscular, but perhaps Isra was just used to being around Alfric.

“You don’t know?” he asked.

She shook her head. “One of Cate’s people?”

“We’re all Cate’s people, in a sense,” he said.

Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.

“Is that a yes?” asked Isra. “Some kind of entad tracking?”

“Maybe it’s better to keep it a mystery, if you don’t know,” said the man. “I guess we don’t even know each other’s names then.”

“Isra,” she replied.

“Callum,” he said. He breathed out a bit. She wanted to ask about the mouse in his pocket, but she didn’t want him to know that she was a druid. “Can I ask why you’re out here?”

“Just hiding out,” said Isra. “Waiting for the day to end, I think.” The others would have information, more than she was going to get from the birds. It was clear the palace would be the place to learn things, but Ria had prohibited all but Verity from going there. After the day was done, and they had more information, it was possible that Isra would be allowed to go into the palace and watch through mice or whatever else was around.

“You’ve been watching people,” said Callum.

Isra tensed again. “And how do you know that?”

“You don’t deny it?” he asked, cocking his head.

“No,” she said. “It’s true. But how do you know? Entad?”

“I’ve heard there are entads like that,” Callum replied. “Those that let you know who’s watching you, and where they are.” He raised an eyebrow. “I think that’s how I got caught, when I did it.”

“Did what?” asked Isra.

In response, he reached into his vest pocket and pulled out the mouse. It was small and brown, and woke slowly, then stood up on the palm of his hand. Isra stared at it. There was still a part of her that thought perhaps it was well-trained, or simply obedient, but when her mind brushed against the mouse, she could tell that there was no more room in it: it was full.

“You’re a druid,” said Isra.

“One of three here,” said Callum, nodding. The mouse ran along his arm and dove back into his pocket. “Four, counting you.”

Isra looked at him for a moment. By rights, she should have felt vulnerable, because her primary defense, being able to call on the animals of the forest, had just been neutered. She hadn’t brought her bow, and even if she had, it would have been quite a bit of work to get it into position in time. She had her dagger, but that was more or less it. She wasn’t supposed to have needed anything.

Still, there was something unthreatening about him. Maybe it was the wispy mustache. She didn’t know how a fight between druids would go, but if they neutralized each other, she thought she could probably cut him up.

“You saw what I was doing with the birds,” said Isra.

“I did,” said Callum. “And I won’t tell anyone, but I thought you should know it’s the sort of thing that will get you in trouble. You’re not supposed to be spying on people.”

“Which … you know from experience,” said Isra.

“I was scolded, yes,” said Callum. He hesitated. “Were you … trained?”

Isra was silent for a moment. She didn’t understand the question, and it was her long-standing policy to not admit when she didn’t understand things, at least unless she was among friends. “No,” she said anyway. “I’m in a druid’s guild, but it’s small, and they don’t speak all that much.”

Callum regarded her for a moment. “Your skin … Tarbin heritage?”

Isra pursed her lips. “My parents left there,” she said.

“Parents … plural?” he asked.