The boy studied her for a long moment in silence and then shook his head. “That explanation is worse than the one you gave before. I’ll ask you again later.”
At one point, they encountered an Elf whom Xac Wen knew, a young woman close to Pan’s age. Xac stopped her and asked for word of Phryne. He was told there was no news of the Princess, that since her escape she had not been seen.
“Just wanted to be sure she hadn’t returned from wherever she disappeared to,” he advised his companions as they left the young woman and walked on.
“She might have returned and not been seen,” Prue suggested.
The boy stopped and looked at her. “That’s so. But then where would she go? She would have to go into hiding right away.”
“She could have found a way to get out of the city and decided to try to reach the Orullians.”
He shook his head. “She would stay put for now. She knows I will be searching for her.” He stopped suddenly. “There is one place she might go.”
He led them hurriedly ahead, moving into a residential section where there were rows of cottages situated on the ground and in the trees overhead. Eventually they reached the tree house that the Orullians had been working on when Pan and Prue had first come to see them weeks ago to discuss the collapse of the protective wall that warded the valley.
“Wait here,” he told them.
He scrambled up the stairs onto the platform on which the cottage was situated and disappeared through the door. Pan and Prue waited patiently for his return.
“He certainly doesn’t lack for energy,” Pan observed quietly.
“He doesn’t lack for determination, either,” Prue added.
They continued to wait, shifting their gazes every so often to the roads and pathways around them, keeping watch. Neither felt entirely comfortable with the situation, even though there was no reason to think they were in any immediate danger.
Xac Wen reappeared abruptly and scampered down the stairs, his young face grim.
“Nothing. She’s not been there. We should go to the arch. If she came back through, she will have left me a sign.”
It took them less than half an hour to reach the gates of the Ashenell burial grounds.
There was little activity in evidence here, the iron gates leading inside open, but the grounds themselves deserted. Xac Wen led his companions ahead without slowing,
taking a direct route toward the Belloruusian Arch.
Even before the boy told them they had reached their destination, Pan knew it for what it was. Built of massive stone blocks stacked one atop another, the Belloruusian Arch was fully twenty feet high and almost as wide. The letter B was carved into its keystone, signifying the surname of the family and marking the entrance to all the tombs and sepulchers that stretched away within the shadow of its broad span.
“This is where she disappeared,” Xac Wen announced, pointing at the arch. “Right there, underneath. She just walked up to it and then vanished.”
Panterra studied the arch and the space below for a long time, trying to see if he could discern something that would explain what had happened to Phryne. But he couldn’t see anything unusual or revealing about it. Stones and earth—that was all.
“There must be a portal of some sort,” Prue said quietly. “There must be magic at work.”
Pan nodded. “Definitely magic.”
He was resting the black staff butt-downward against the earth, running his fingers slowly up and down its length, feeling the runes respond with a soft tingle. The staff’s magic was awake, perhaps responding to something he couldn’t see. It was sending him a signal—perhaps a warning—of something waiting.
Yet Prue had said nothing of her instincts responding to any danger. They had been quick enough to warn her when Bonnasaint had lain in wait for them in the meres. So perhaps the staff’s response was to the presence of another magic and not necessarily to anything dangerous.
“Do your instincts tell you we are threatened?” he asked her quietly.
She shook her head no.
“Wait here for me,” he told her.
He walked forward alone, taking his time, the magic of the black staff fully awake now, coursing up and down its length and into his body. He was prepared to use it if he was attacked, but he couldn’t find anything that suggested this might happen. The Belloruusian Arch and the ground about it were empty of movement or sound or life of any sort. He studied the space beneath the arch where Phryne had disappeared, but he couldn’t see anything of where she might have gone.
When he was very close, he called up the magic and gave the space directly ahead of him a spray of its bright light. For just an instant, something flickered in response—a sliver of darkness, a splitting of the air that was little more than a vertical shimmer. It was there and then gone again in an instant. Pan blinked in response to its quick, momentary appearance, not certain what it was he had seen.