SIMRALIN COMPLETED HER MEASUREMENTS and stood at the very center of the forested bluff, looking around. “I think this is the place, Kirisin.”
The boy nodded. “It feels right. The Elves will want height and distance when they emerge, a sense of being apart from the rest of the world. They won’t be able to change their feelings about that right away. It will be hard enough for them to accept that they can no longer hide.”
He’s growing up, Logan thought approvingly. He was standing next to the boy watching Simralin pace off the distance atop the bluff, measuring the available space for the Elven city. His black staff was strapped across his back, out of his hands for the first time that he could remember. He’d tied it there for the journey across the valley. There hadn’t been any need for it since they had arrived. For reasons he couldn’t explain, he didn’t think there would be any need for it again.
He smiled despite himself at the idea.
“The others from the caravan will have to get used to the Elves, too,” he interrupted the siblings. “They all have to share this valley together.”
“It will help that most of them are children,” Simralin added.
It will help mostly that they have to make it work because this is all there is, Logan amended. But he kept that to himself, too.
In the company of the remainder of the Elves, the handful who had found their way clear of the Cintra, they had traveled all day to reach this spot. Simralin had explored it two days earlier and come back with her report. By then, they had been inside the valley—this safehold to which Hawk had taken them—for three weeks. The caravan was already beginning to split apart and its members to take their leave and go out to make their homes in this new world. The Lizards and Spiders and the other mutants had been the first, gone the very night of their arrival. No one had suggested that they needed to live apart; it was mostly an individual choice that each species had made. Some distance between the different groups wasn’t necessarily a bad thing, Logan thought. They would need time to adjust to this new life. They would need space to grow accustomed to what that required.
But the distance felt odd to him. He had made his decision, too. In choosing to be Simralin’s partner, he had stepped across a line. He must go with the Elves because those were her people and she had told him from the first that she would always live among them. Because he had no people, it felt right that he should live with hers. But it was hard leaving the Ghosts. Hawk, Tessa, Owl, Sparrow, little Candle, River, and Bear—they had become a kind of family for him over the past weeks, children he had taken under his wing, the first children he had really gotten to know in all the years he had been saving them from the slave camps.
Still, Angel Perez had stayed behind, and they would all be a part of the community of children and caregivers living under the leadership of Helen Rice. Already, they had begun work on permanent homes, building with the tools they had managed to carry with them in their flight. It was probably best for them to be together there and for him to be with Simralin here.
A part of him ached nevertheless.
“What do you think I need to do now?” Kirisin asked, glancing from Logan to his sister and back again.
“I think you need to do what your heart tells you, Little K,” Simralin said.
“We better back off a ways,” Logan advised. “We’re standing right in the middle of where you plan to put the city.”
They did as he advised, taking the other Elves with them, moving to one side of the open space on which they intended to locate the city and its Elves when they were released from the Loden. When they were safely clear, Kirisin took out the Loden and held it in his hand, looking down at it dubiously.
“I wish I knew more about what I was doing,” he said, glancing at Logan.
Logan understood. He had wished for that more than once on this journey. But much of life didn’t allow for knowing things in advance, and you had to trust to your instincts and common sense. Kirisin knew as much about Elven magic as anyone alive, including all those trapped inside the Elfstone. So there was nothing much anyone else could do to help him through this.
“Go on,” he said gently. “You used it before to put them inside. Do the same thing now to bring them back out.”