“She said she was willing to give up her sight in order to help me, but I don’t know.
Not being able to see colors anymore doesn’t sound so bad, but I think it is. Especially for a Tracker, for someone who spends her entire life outdoors. Seeing colors is important to what we do. It helps identify things. It blends with smell and taste and feeling and hearing. They all work together to tell us what we need to know. She doesn’t have that now. Not like she did.”
“She would do anything for you, Pan.” She gave him a long look as she took the last bite of the bread he had given her. “You know that. You shouldn’t be surprised by her sacrifice.”
“I’m not surprised, but I don’t like it. She wasn’t aware of what she was giving up. She doesn’t even know for sure if it will make a difference. She doesn’t know how to help me. No one in the valley has ever come up against a demon. No one knows anything useful—how to defend against them or what it would take to kill one. How can she know what to do?”
Phryne shrugged. “You can never really know, can you? Not even if you know that it’s coming and when it will come. Not even if it’s something you’ve faced before. You go on instinct. That’s what she’ll do here. That’s what you’ll do, too.” She paused. “I don’t think the King of the Silver River would have given her this … this burden if he didn’t think she was able to carry it. He must have some reason for thinking she can make a difference. Otherwise, the whole exercise is pointless.”
“I know. I know that’s so. Rationally, I know. But emotionally?” He shook his head.
“The King of the Silver River is a spirit creature, a being out of the old world of Faerie, and who knows what he’s thinking or what he has planned? It might not be what we think.”
She gave him a smile. “So it’s good that everything else that’s been shoved on us is so well sorted out, isn’t it? You with your black staff and its magic and me with my Elfstones and their magic, all of it so perfectly understandable and easily managed—no troublesome uncertainties at all.”
She watched her smile transfer itself to his face. “Well, when you put it that way …”
He got to his feet. “When you put it that way, I guess it’s time to start walking again.”
They set out shortly afterward, leaving further discussion for later. They both knew how hard this was going to be, and they knew as well how the odds were stacked against them in a way that did not offer a great deal of hope. But sharing the uncertainty and danger made it more manageable than it would have been otherwise, and that was something that Phryne was clinging to.
After what seemed like hours—though it was impossible to tell how much time had passed—they reached the place shown them by the Elfstones and found the way forward blocked by what appeared to be a transparent curtain of water spread across the entire width of the passageway. Except that, on closer inspection, they discovered it was not water at all. It was something else, more like spiderwebbing, more fibrous than liquid. It rippled gently, fastened to the rock all the way around at the edges, no gaps at all, its membrane clear enough that they could see colors and shapes on the other side.
They could see the end of the tunnel.
“Isn’t that a forest out there?” Phryne asked.
Panterra nodded wordlessly. He stepped forward and touched the curtain experimentally with the end of his staff. The membrane shivered, and then the staff passed through, as if the surface were liquid after all. He drew the staff back again, looked at it, touched it where it had penetrated and shook his head.
“Nothing. No film, no dampness, nothing.” He looked at her. “Want to try just walking through?”
She nodded. “I think we have to.”
She took his hand. Together, they stepped toward the strange transparency and passed through.
There was a moment of dislocation, of being in one place and then another. The temperature warmed, the light brightened, and the smells that filled the air freshened.
All of a sudden they were no longer underground, the passageway and the cavern they had fled as distant as yesterday. Instead, they stood at the mouth of a cave that opened out onto the forest they had seen while still on the other side of the strange transparency.
Phryne looked back the way they had come. The curtain and the passageway it had barred were gone. She was looking at a solid rock wall that formed the back of the cave in which they now found themselves. It was clear that magic had allowed them to leave, but would not allow them to reenter.