They left three days later, in the early morning before the household was fully up, which was when the shadows were long and cold and the east field was just beginning to catch the first grey light.
Mira had made breakfast. The entire household was in the kitchen at an hour it did not usually contain the entire household, and the breakfast was the specific kind of breakfast that Mira made when she was managing something by feeding people, which was one of the primary ways she managed things. Edric was at the table with his cup and said nothing particular but was present in the way he was present when something important was happening and he had decided the right contribution was his own presence.
Thomas had come in from the barn early. He stood at the kitchen counter and looked at Maren, who had made the tea, and she looked back at him, and the exchange was the brief specific kind that happened between people who had been having long quiet conversations over the winter and did not need many words to say a thing.
Arthur checked the packs, which were already in dimensional storage and had been checked twice, and confirmed the wing spells were stable on all three — he had spent the previous evening running Lyra and Clara and Saya through the updated version, the one with the spatial acceleration layer, at the reduced speed setting that was appropriate for forest canopy navigation. Not five hundred kilometers per hour in the open air. Something manageable in tight spaces, responsive, with the quick-stop capability that the original version had always had.
Saya had her coat on before anyone told her it was time.
Mira held each of them for a moment before they went outside. She held Clara for slightly longer and Clara let her, which was its own data point. She held Saya last and said something quietly into her hair that Arthur did not hear and that was not meant for him.
They went out into the grey morning and found their shadows and cast their wings.
◆ ◆ ◆
The Veiling Forest from above was larger than his flight to Vareth had suggested.
North, east, west — trees to every horizon. South was the last visible strip of farmland and county road, shrinking quickly as they gained altitude. They flew northwest and within an hour the farm was gone and there was nothing below them but canopy.
Arthur had thirty Shadow copies deployed within ten minutes — spread in every direction, mapping continuously, feeding data back through the network. He would analyze the full picture each evening.
The trees near Thornwick were old. What was below them two hours north was different. The ironwood trees were not individually remarkable from altitude except for their crown spread, which was wider than anything he had seen, and their color — the specific dark green-black of wood with iron content in the fiber. They looked like a denser, darker version of the forest behind them.
Then they descended into the canopy and the scale resolved.
The first ironwood trunk they passed was wider than the farmhouse. The bark had its own ecosystem on it — mosses and smaller plants climbing two hundred feet to the crown, the leaves at the top the size of doors.
'Oh,' Clara said, from three feet to his left. She was looking at the trunk. 'That's very large.'
'Yes,' Arthur said.
'We're quite small.'
Lyra had her journal out and was writing while flying. Saya was ahead of them, moving between the trunks with the ease of someone whose spatial awareness had been calibrated to forest navigation from childhood. Her ears were forward and her tail was up and she was looking for something familiar at the edges of something entirely new.
They heard the canyon before they saw it.
A deep resonant sound rising from below — not quite a roar, not quite an echo — and then the canopy thinned ahead and ended and they flew out over a gap in the forest floor that went down and kept going, past the point where the light reached, past the point where Arthur could see the bottom at all.
Half a mile wide. No visible floor. From the depths: sounds. Large sounds, carrying significant magical density even at this range. The walls were vertical ironwood roots exposed by whatever had created the gap, thick as buildings, descending into the dark.
'How deep is that,' Clara said.
'I don't know and I don't want wait around to find out,' Arthur said while flying back over solid ground.
Lyra was sketching in her journal very fast.
'Something is alive at the bottom,' Saya said, looking down with the amber eyes that saw things ordinary senses didn't. 'More than one something. Very large. Very old.'
They did not go down. They flew west along the canyon's edge until the canopy resumed, and nobody talked much for the next hour.
The waterfall came on the second day — a cliff face hidden behind the canopy until they were nearly on it, two hundred feet of rock with a river coming off the top that produced a spray cloud visible from a distance and a roar that filled the valley below. The pool at the base was clear to its depth and dense with magic, the kind that accumulated from long exposure to a forest this old.
Clara landed at the edge and looked up.
'I want to go under it,' she said.
'It would knock you flat,' Arthur said.
'I'm significantly more durable than I was in October.'
'The water doesn't care about dragon meat,' he said.
She looked at the fall with the expression of someone filing a project for a future date.
They camped there that night. Arthur pulled the evening meal from dimensional storage — his mother's cooking, still hot, which produced the specific complicated feeling of sitting at the edge of a waterfall two days into a forest that had no bottom and eating something that smelled like home.
Saya sat beside him and looked at the falling water.
'My grandmother told me about a waterfall,' she said. 'In one of the tribe's old territory stories. She said the water tasted like lightning.'
'Is this it,' Lyra said. Journal open.
'I don't know.' Saya looked at the pool. 'Maybe.'
After dinner he called his mother. Her face on the device was the face of a woman managing her worry competently. She saw the waterfall over his shoulder and looked at it for a moment.
'Come home in two days,' she said.
'Two days,' he confirmed.
The stars over the canyon that night were the most stars he had ever seen at once.
◆ ◆ ◆
They encountered the first large dangerous creature on the third day.
It was a scaled quadruped the size of a barn with a magical aura that Shadow's network flagged as significant threat before any of them had seen it directly — they were in the understory when the flag came through and Arthur had them in the upper canopy within thirty seconds. The creature passed below them through the undergrowth with the specific unhurried quality of something that had no reason to hurry, leaving a trail in the forest floor that would have been visible from the air.
Clara watched it pass from her perch forty feet up an ironwood branch.
'How does anything survive down here,' she said. Not a question exactly, more the processing of a fact that was difficult to contain.
'Things that are built for it,' Arthur said. He was watching the creature's magic signature as it moved away, reading the specific architecture of something that had been shaped by this environment over generations. 'Or things that are very good at not being seen.'
Lyra was writing.
'Saya's tribe has been living in this forest,' Clara said.
'A version of this forest. Probably the outer ranges.' Arthur looked north, where the shadow network was still mapping. 'The deep forest gets denser toward the center. They would know where the boundaries were.'
Saya had been quiet since the creature passed. She had her ears back in the way she held them when she was thinking something she was not ready to say.
'What,' Arthur said.
'Nothing is familiar,' she said. 'I keep looking. My grandmother's stories — the landmarks, the specific trees she described — I haven't seen any of them. I don't know if we're in the wrong part of the forest or if I'm simply not recognizing them because I was never here and only heard about them.' She looked at him. 'I'm worried we're looking in the wrong direction entirely.'
He looked at the mapping data from the shadow network. Thirty copies, running since they entered the forest, building a picture that was large and complex and that he had been analyzing every evening. He pulled the three days' worth of accumulation and looked at it with the specific attention he gave to pattern recognition in large datasets.
There were settlements in the data. Small ones, hard to distinguish from natural formations without the diagnostic layer — but the shadow network had the diagnostic layer, and the pattern of deliberate construction was different from the pattern of natural growth in ways that were visible if you knew what to look for. He had been finding and filing them as he went, noting them as potential information sources, moving toward the westward heading the tribe search had suggested.
He had not yet told Saya about the one he had found that morning because he had not been certain what it was until he looked at the full three-day map.
Now he was certain.
'There's a settlement,' he said. 'Half a day west. It's not a fox tribe settlement — the construction pattern is wrong. But it's large enough to have information about the forest, and it's in the direction we need to go.'
Saya looked at him.
'I wasn't sure what it was until an hour ago.'
She looked at the forest in the direction he had indicated. Her ears came forward.
'Then let's go,' she said.
◆ ◆ ◆