They reached the mine on the twenty-fourth day.
It sat in a fold of grey hill country eleven miles south of the border, and Sito smelled it before he saw it. Turned earth and rock dust and too many men living in one place without enough water to wash in.
The camp had gone up fast and it showed. Two hundred tents in no particular arrangement, a corral of pit ponies, spoil heaps the size of houses, and a raw black hole cut into the hillside with timber shoring around the mouth.
Baron Geralt met them at the edge of it, and he looked considerably worse than he had in the throne room.
"Lord Benedictus. Your Highness." He bowed to both of them, and his beard had grey in it that Sito was fairly sure had not been there five weeks ago. "Forgive the state of us."
"You've done a great deal in a short time, Baron."
"I've done a great deal of digging in a short time. The rest of it's been standing about waiting."
Marcus glanced at the mine mouth. "The guild?"
"Arrived nine days ago. Four teams. They've been mapping the first two levels and arguing about the third." The Baron's jaw worked. "They descend tomorrow, if the arguing holds to schedule."
"And the first two run north."
The Baron looked at him for a moment.
Aye, my lord," he said. "They run north"
"And until tomorrow?"
"Until tomorrow," said the Baron, "we do what we have been doing for five weeks."
---
Sito asked to see it, and Marcus surprised him by saying yes.
They went down on foot, along a sloping tunnel wide enough for two carts abreast, lit every twenty feet by lanterns hung on iron hooks.
The air got colder and stopped moving. The sound of the camp above cut off all at once, about a hundred paces in, the way it had in the gate tunnel at Epiria.
Sito counted eight side galleries branching off before they reached the bottom.
In the wall of the lowest chamber there was a hole in the air.
It was about twice the height of a man, roughly oval, and it had no edges he could make sense of. The rock simply stopped being rock and became a flat, dull, lightless surface that his eyes slid off every time he tried to look directly at it.
Eleven men and women sat around it in a rough semicircle, playing cards and not looking at it.
"Six hours on," Marcus said quietly. "Then out, and the next one goes in. They have been doing that since the day the Baron's diggers broke through."
"And if nobody's in there?"
"Then it finishes collapsing, and whatever is inside comes out into a hillside eleven miles from the Vradian border with two hundred miners standing on top of it."
Sito looked at the hole. He had read about dungeon portals in four separate books. None of the books had mentioned that they were quiet.
The surface rippled. A man stepped out of it.
He was perhaps thirty, narrow-shouldered, wearing guild leathers with a cheap sword on his hip, and he walked six paces from the portal before his legs stopped working properly and he sat down hard on the floor of the chamber.
Nobody around the semicircle reacted. One of them got up without a word and walked into the hole, and it swallowed her the way water swallows a dropped stone.
Somebody else brought the seated man a skin of water.
Sito went over and crouched in front of him.
"Are you all right?"
The man looked up, saw a seven-year-old in a good coat with two swords on his belt, and evidently decided he was too tired to work out what that meant.
"I'm fine, lad."
"What's it like in there?"
The man drank. His hands were not steady, and he had to use both of them.
"Dark," he said. "You go in about four paces and you stop, because that's as far as you're meant to go. There's light behind you off the portal. There's none in front."
"And then?"
"And then you count. That's the whole of it. You stand there and you count to six hours." He wiped his mouth. "About the second hour you start hearing it. Something big, out past where the light stops. Moving around. Breathing."
"What is it?"
"Don't know."
"You didn't look?"
The man laughed, and it came out wrong, high and thin.
"No, lad. You don't turn round." He handed the skin back. "You turn round, you might see it. You see it, you'll run. And if you run, it follows you out, and then it's not four paces from the door, it's up top in the camp with the cooks."
Sito had no response to that.
"Sixty-two marks a shift," the man added, as if Sito had asked. "More than I've made in a year of clearing rat dens. My wife's due in the spring."
He got up, joined the card game, and picked up a hand somebody had been holding for him.
---
They were back on the road within the hour, and Sito didn't say much for the rest of the day.
He kept thinking about the man sitting on the floor with his legs not working, and about the sixty-two marks, and about the King saying 'have this dungeon destroyed as soon as possible' from a chair in a warm room hundreds of miles away, and about how reasonable it had sounded at the time.
It had also been correct. That was the part he couldn't get past.
'Doing correct things,' he thought, 'for reasons you'd be ashamed to say out loud.'
---
The land changed on the twenty-sixth day.
It happened over the course of a morning. The hill country flattened and greened. The scrub oak got taller and then got denser, and the gaps between the stands closed up, and then there weren't stands anymore, there was just forest on both sides of a road that had narrowed to a cart track.
Then the track topped a rise and Sito saw the Mist Forest.
He had spent seven years looking at walls and had thought he understood large things.
The treeline ran east and west across the whole of the horizon in both directions, unbroken, and it did not look like a forest so much as a second country stacked on top of the first one. The trees at the front were ordinary trees, sixty or eighty feet, the sort of thing that grew anywhere.
Behind them the ground rose, and behind that the trees stopped being ordinary.
Sito could not work out the scale at first. His eyes kept trying to put the far trunks at the distance of the near ones and failing, and the failure made his stomach turn over slightly.
Then he found a trunk with a waterfall coming down beside it, and he had the waterfall for scale, and he understood.
"Those are three hundred feet," he said.
"Those are the small ones," said Marcus.
Above it all, at a height Sito could not judge and holding to it with absolute consistency, was the mist.
A flat white ceiling laid over the canopy from the treeline to as far north as he could see, unmoving, with the crowns of the largest trees pushing up through it like rocks in a river.
"It never lifts?"
"Never. Not in any account I've read, and I've read them all." Marcus was watching the boy's face rather than the forest. "The elves say it's the forest breathing. The scholars say it's the mana density doing something to the air. The two may be the same statement."
Sito said nothing for a while.
"Marcus."
"Hm."
"We were going to send an army in there."
"Duncan was going to explain to your father why we would not be sending an army in there," Marcus said. "Which he did. Very briefly, and using much shorter words than usual."
---
They made camp a mile short of the treeline.
At some point between the horses being unhitched and the first fire being lit, the elves arrived, and nobody saw them do it.
Sito turned around to ask Corbin where his pack had gone and there were nine of them standing at the edge of the camp.
They were tall. That was the first thing, and the books had mentioned it, and the books had undersold it — the shortest of them was a head above Osric and built like something made for reaching. Grey-green cloth, bows carried unstrung, and their faces were sharper than a human's in a way Sito could not have described but recognized immediately, like the difference between a hawk and a pigeon.
They had made no sound at all. Twelve royal guards and a Fifth Circle Master, and the first anybody knew was when they chose to be seen.
Osric's hand was on his sword. It stayed there.
The elf in front of them raised both hands, palms out, and spoke in flawless Epirian.
"You came by the road."
Marcus stepped forward. "We did."
"You had thirty days of good weather. There is an anchor stone in Fallowmere, six days from your capital, and it is four hundred miles nearer than this." The elf's voice was mild. "You came by the road."
"We did."
"Why?"
"Because I did not want the first thing you knew of me to be a hole in the air outside your border," Marcus said.
The elf looked at him for a long moment.
"I am Thaen. Warden of the southern reach." He lowered his hands. "The road was noticed. It has been noticed for eleven days."
"I assumed as much."
"You assumed correctly." Thaen's gaze moved down the line of the caravan, unhurried, cataloguing. It passed over the guards. It passed over the wagons.
It stopped on Sito, and stayed on him a beat longer than it had stopped on anything else.
Sito, who was seven and being looked at by an elf for the first time in his life, grinned up at him.
Thaen did not grin back. He looked at the boy a moment more, and something crossed his face too quickly to read, and then he turned back to Marcus as though nothing had happened.
"You will camp here tonight. Not past the stones." He indicated a line of low grey markers that Sito had walked past twice already without noticing they were anything. "In the morning I will take you in."
"You have my thanks, Warden."
"You have not earned my thanks yet, ambassador." It was said without heat. "But you came by the road. That is a place to start."
---
The trouble happened forty minutes later, and it was nobody's fault, which was rather the point.
A guard named Bertram, who had been on the road for twenty-six days and wanted a clean picket line, took his hatchet to a sapling at the camp's edge. It was a young ash about as thick as his wrist. He cut it in two strokes, the way a man does a thing he has done four hundred times.
Every elf in the clearing turned at once.
Sito felt the air change. There was nothing he could point at — no shout, no weapon drawn — but eight bows that had been hanging loose were suddenly in eight hands, and the nine tall, calm, mild-mannered figures at the edge of the firelight had stopped being calm without appearing to move at all.
Bertram stood holding the hatchet and the top half of a sapling and went white.
Marcus was between them before Sito saw him stand up.
"Warden."
Thaen's eyes were fixed past him on the cut stump. When he spoke his voice was exactly as mild as it had been, and Sito found that this was much worse.
"Do you know how long that took."
"I do not."
"Eleven years." Thaen came forward three steps and crouched by the stump, and put his fingers against the raw cut. "It would have taken two hundred more. It was not in your way. He did not need it. He wanted a straight line for his rope."
"He did not know."
"No," Thaen agreed. "That is precisely the difficulty with your people. You never do."
Nobody breathed.
Marcus knelt down in the grass beside him. He did it slowly, and he did it in a very expensive coat, in front of twelve of his own guards.
"Then teach us where the line is, Warden, and we will not cross it again on this side of it or the other. I would rather be corrected tonight than be forgiven all the way to your capital."
Thaen turned his head.
The two of them stayed like that for a while, and Sito watched the whole thing with his heart going and understood that he was being shown something more useful than anything he had ever seen in the throne room.
Then Thaen stood.
"Harm nothing living and respect it the same as you would any sentient life," he said. "Your man will not be punished."
"And the tree?"
"The tree is dead, ambassador. What's done is done, however, future offences will not be taken so lightly now that you've been warned."
He walked back to his people. The bows went down. Within a minute the elves were sitting again as though nothing at all had occurred, and Bertram had to be told twice to put the hatchet away.
---
The camp was very quiet after that.
Around the third hour of full dark, with nobody talking and the fire low, Sito went and got his rook.
He did not do it as a diplomatic maneuver. He was seven, the camp was miserable, he was a long way from home and he played every single night, and this night felt like one where he ought to.
He sat down on a saddle with his back to the elves and played the sparrow song.
*Count the sparrows on the wall, my love,*
*count them one and two.*
*When the dark comes up the hill, my love,*
*I'll be counting too.*
He got through it once, and then went round again because the guards liked it, and somewhere in the second pass he realized the woodline had gone even quieter than it already was.
When he stopped and looked up, all nine of them were watching him.
Thaen came over. He stopped a respectful distance short and stood there with his hands loose at his sides.
"That instrument is very badly made," he said.
Sito blinked. "Uh. Thanks?"
"I am not insulting you. I am telling you that the box is too shallow and the woods do not agree with one another, and you have been compensating for both without knowing that is what you have been doing." Thaen tipped his head slightly. "Who taught you?"
"Nobody. My aunt sang. I copied her."
"Mm." Thaen looked at the rook a moment longer. "There are well over a hundred instrument makers in Thelvarion. Perhaps two of them are any good."
He turned and walked back to the woodline.
Ramsey leaned over, wide-eyed. "Was that a compliment, your highness?"
"I have no idea," Sito said.
Marcus, who had been silent for some time, was looking at the boy with an expression Sito couldn't read at all.
'Twenty-six days,' Marcus thought, 'and I have gotten nine words out of that man that were not about protocol, and the child got over one hundred instrument makers.'
---
They went in at dawn, and the wagons stayed behind.
There were no roads in Vradia. Sito had read that and had assumed it was an exaggeration, the way "unbreachable walls" was an exaggeration, and it turned out to be simple description.
Four guards stayed with the horses at the stones. Marcus, Sito, Osric, Willem, Ramsey and four others went in on foot with what they could carry.
The change happened about a quarter mile past the treeline, and it happened to everyone except Sito.
Willem stopped walking.
"Gods," he said.
"Aye," said Osric.
Ramsey had both hands out in front of him, palms open, like a man testing rain. "It's like — your highness, it's *thick*. It's like standing in a river."
"What is?"
"The mana." Ramsey was grinning at nothing. "I can feel it on my skin. My core's drinking it and I'm not even doing anything. Twenty years of cultivation and I've never—"
He broke off and looked around at the trees with an expression of genuine reverence.
"Two weeks in here," Willem said quietly, "and a man might close a ring."
Sito looked up at the canopy and tried very hard to feel something.
He didn't. The air was cool and smelled of wet bark and something faintly sweet, and the light coming down through three hundred feet of leaves was green and moved when the leaves moved, and that was all of it.
He wasn't troubled by this, and neither was anyone else. He was seven. He had no core. There was nothing in him yet for the mana to touch.
Every child in every kingdom walked around unable to feel the thing that ran the world, right up until the day they turned thirteen.
"Ramsey, what's it like?"
"Like being warm," Ramsey said. "Like being warm from the inside, only in your bones instead of your belly."
"Huh," said Sito, and went back to looking at the trees.
Ahead of them, Thaen had stopped and turned around, and for the second time was looking at the boy rather than at the ambassador.
---
They walked for two days.
Thelvarion sat in the crook of a valley where two rivers met, and Sito did not see it until they were almost inside it, because the elves had not built a city so much as talked the forest into becoming one.
There were towers. They were trees. The distinction had stopped being meaningful somewhere around five hundred years ago.
Bridges ran between the great trunks at six or seven different heights, sagging with age and moss, some of them wide enough for carts and some of them a single rope.
Light came down in shafts through gaps in the canopy and landed on terraces of moss and cut stone where elves sat and worked and argued.
Water ran everywhere, in wooden channels, down carved stone faces, off the edges of things in long white threads that came apart into mist before they hit anything.
And it was loud. That was the thing Sito had not expected at all.
There were thousands of them.
Children running along a low bridge with something stolen. Two women shouting at each other across forty feet of open air in a language he didn't know, with what was unmistakably enjoyment. Somebody hammering. Somebody, a long way up, singing.
Marcus stepped up beside him.
"Close your mouth, your highness. You're representing the Kingdom."
Sito closed his mouth.
"Better." Marcus adjusted his cuffs. "Now. You will be presented to King Sylvaen and Queen Lirien this evening, you will speak when spoken to, and you will under no circumstances tell anyone what we want the mine for until I have done it first."
"What do I do until then?"
"You bathe," said Marcus. "Extensively."