The second day was deeper and stranger than the first.
The forest changed as they pushed west — the ironwood trees growing older and denser, the canopy thicker, the quality of the light filtering down through it shifting toward something that was less like daylight and more like being inside something that had its own internal luminosity. The magical density Arthur's passive diagnostic registered was higher here than anywhere he had mapped in the Veiling Forest except directly above the canyon.
They saw no large dangerous creatures. This was notable. The territory they had flown through the first day had required two diversions around large predators flagged by Shadow's network. Today there was nothing — not an absence of life, the forest was alive, but the specific absence of the top-tier threat category that had been present throughout the rest of the deep forest.
Something was managing this territory.
He filed this and did not say it aloud but from the way Lyra looked at the tree line periodically he suspected she had reached the same conclusion.
They stopped once, briefly, to eat and rest, and continued west.
On the morning of the second day Shadow flagged a structure. Then several structures. Then what the mapping feed was increasingly insisting was not a settlement.
He slowed them down.
'Up,' he said. 'Above the canopy. I want to see this from above first.'
They rose through the crown layer and into the open air above the forest and turned west and looked at what was there.
◆ ◆ ◆
From above the canopy, you could almost miss it.
Almost.
The plateau stretched for perhaps half a mile, rising slightly above the surrounding forest level, covered in ironwood trees that were denser and older than anything they had flown over. And then, once Arthur's eye had found the pattern — the way certain trees were not quite random, the way the canopy spacing had a deliberateness to it, the way the light reflected differently from surfaces that were not bark — it stopped being invisible.
Homes carved into the ironwood trunks, three and four stories of them, accessed by bridges that were woven from living vine and moved slightly in the wind with the organic quality of things that were still growing. The bridges connected tree to tree across gaps that would have required a considerable jump without them, running between homes and platforms and larger structures that occupied the spaces between the great trunks.
At the plateau's center: one tree that was not like the others.
It was three times the width of the largest ironwood they had flown past, which put it at a width that was not quite believable until you held it against the scale of what surrounded it and confirmed the arithmetic. It rose above the canopy by another eighty feet and its crown was so wide that it had become its own ecosystem, with smaller trees growing on the larger branches and a platform structure at the upper levels that was the largest single constructed surface Arthur had seen outside of a city.
The whole thing was walled — stone and living vine, grown together into something that was neither purely built nor purely grown, running the plateau's full perimeter with regular patrol positions that even from altitude had the specific spacing of a defensive system that had been designed by people who thought carefully about defense.
Elves on the wall. Elves on the bridges. Elves on platforms between the high branches.
A city. Not a settlement, not a tribe's camp. A city that had been here long enough to grow into the forest and had the forest grow into it.
Clara had stopped flying and was hovering, looking at it.
'That,' she said, 'is not a tribe.'
'No,' Arthur said.
'When the chief said settlement — '
'I think his frame of reference is different from theirs.'
'Arthur.' She looked at him. 'That is an entire city.'
'Yes,' he said. 'I can see that.'
'And we just — sent them a note.'
'We sent them a respectful request with gifts,' Lyra said. She was also hovering, journal out, making notes that Arthur could see contained dimensions and structural observations. 'They sent a response. They are expecting us.'
'They're expecting us,' Clara said. 'To walk up to the gate of a city.' She looked at the wall, which from this altitude showed the full extent of its patrol pattern clearly. 'A very large, very well-defended city.'
'Yes,' Arthur said.
'With elves on every wall and every bridge and probably watching us right now from those platforms.'
'Almost certainly,' he said.
She was quiet for a moment. 'Should we perhaps have brought more gifts.'
'We have what we have,' Arthur said. 'Let's go.'
He tipped his wings and began the descent toward the plateau's edge, toward the gate that was visible at the western wall — large, arched, built from the same stone-and-vine construction as the wall itself, with two figures standing at it that were visible from altitude and were definitely watching them come down.
Below him Clara was still talking, something about gifts and first impressions, and Lyra was writing while descending which was a skill she had developed and which continued to be both impressive and slightly alarming, and Saya had moved up beside him with the expression she had when she was genuinely curious about what was going to happen next.
The gate grew larger as they dropped.
The figures at it resolved into shapes — tall, still, with the specific quality of stillness that was not the stillness of people who were waiting but the stillness of people who had been ready for a while and were not concerned about the approach.
Arthur folded his wings as the forest closed around them on the descent and felt the specific feeling he got when he was moving toward something that was going to be interesting.
He landed thirty feet from the gate.
The two elves at it were looking at them.
He looked back.
'Hello,' he said.
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