CHAPTER HUNDRED AND TWENTY-TWOThey broke camp the next morning with Seth back on his feet, still moving stiffly and drinking more water than seemed necessary, but insisting loudly enough that nobody argued with him about it that he'd rather walk under his own power than be fussed over for another day, and Patrick understood well enough not to push it, since he suspected he'd have said the same thing in Seth's position. Dwayne had the map out before they'd gone half a mile, unrolling it against a flat rock while the others gathered around, and something in the way he studied it this time was different from the dozen other times he'd done the same over the past weeks, less puzzled, more certain, his finger tracing a line across the parchment with confidence"This matches," he said, more to himself than to anyone else. "I couldn't place it before because we hadn't gone far enough east. But this ridge here" he tapped a spot on the map, then gestured vaguely toward the rise of land past

CHAPTER HUNDRED AND TWENTY-FOURThe structure at the far end of the causeway turned out to be smaller than it had looked through the haze, a squat building of the same pale stone as the ruins around it, half-collapsed on one side but with enough of its walls still standing that Patrick could make out something of what it must once have been — not a temple, exactly, though it had that same weight to it, more like a place built to hold something rather than to hold people, no windows that he could see, a single entrance yawning dark ahead of them where a door had either rotted away or never existed at all."Careful," Heather said, though nobody needed the reminder by that point, and they moved into the entrance in the same loose formation they'd used crossing the ledge, Patrick and Borius flanking the front with Lucy and Seth close behind and Dwayne bringing up the rear, watching the way back the way he always did, whether out of genuine caution or habit born from something else Patrick

CHAPTER HUNDRED AND TWENTY-SIXThe woman didn't stay much longer after that, unwilling, it seemed, to linger any closer to the ruins than she had to, and before she turned to leave she gave them the last of what she'd come to offer not a map, nothing so precise as that, but a description of the terrain past the ruins that matched, close enough to make Dwayne go quiet and thoughtful over his own notes, something Charles Oliver had apparently mentioned to Borius and Heather in his cell before his execution, a detail about a hollow beneath a split tree that none of them had thought much of at the time because it hadn't meant anything yet."There's a valley past the second ridge," the woman said, already backing toward the gap in the peaks where her two companions waited. "Steep on both sides, thick with old growth nobody's cleared in longer than anyone living can say. If your medallion is real, and if it's anywhere near here, that's where I'd look first. Not because I know anything about

CHAPTER HUNDRED AND TWENTY-EIGHTThey found her not past the ridge but on it, sitting on a flat outcrop of rock with the valley spread out below her, and the sight of her sitting there, whole and apparently unharmed, hit Patrick with a wave of relief so sharp it nearly buckled his knees before the next thought caught up with it, that whole and unharmed didn't mean the same thing as fine, and something in the stillness of her posture, the way she hadn't turned at the sound of five people scrambling up the last stretch of the slope toward her, told him this wasn't going to be the simple, grateful reunion he'd been hoping for the whole way here."Lucy." He reached her first, dropping to a crouch in front of her, hands hovering like he wasn't sure yet whether touching her was the right thing to do. "Are you hurt? Talk to me."She blinked, and it took a beat too long for her eyes to actually focus on him, like she was surfacing from somewhere deep enough that the trip back took real effort

CHAPTER HUNDRED AND THIRTYThe quiet inside the tree line didn't ease the further they went, if anything it deepened, until Patrick found himself listening for the small sounds a forest should have made and hearing nothing where they should have been, no birdsong, no insects working the undergrowth, nothing but the soft fall of their own footsteps against a carpet of old leaves that hadn't fully rotted the way leaves usually did, as though even the ordinary business of decay moved slower here than it did anywhere else."How far to the split tree," Borius asked, and even he kept his voice low, without anyone needing to tell him to."I don't know," Dwayne admitted, map rolled and tucked away now, since it had nothing useful left to offer once they were actually inside the growth it could only gesture toward from the outside. "Charles Oliver never gave a distance. Just that it was there, and that it mattered."They walked for what felt like an hour without any clear marker of progress, t