Now that it was light and it was child’s play to fix our direction, I ascended up to perhaps a thousand feet, and we could see the lay of the land more clearly. Little matchstick villages were scattered beneath us, flocks of sheep being brought in for shearing, teams of oxen pulling ploughs across spell-enhanced soil. It was only rarely that the druidic committees forced the lands to lie fallow, and even from up here I couldn’t spot a single field left untouched; the signs of activity were everywhere – the tents of marketplaces were like tiny patches of gems in the grass, pavilions blue and white and yellow; plenty of carts were twisting about the paths winding to and fro between trading outposts, and parties of travellers on horseback. The Plain Road was dotted every fifteen or twenty miles with towns, if they could be called that – I doubted any one of them was half as big as even Helbert’s Bend, but these road-stops were all named on my map: Griffon’s Lodge with its white-blossomed groves, Arlbrowtain with its seven streams, Hidden Hedge with its wheat-coated roofs… The bigger towns were down by the Greywater, which had snaked out of sight to the west.

The road itself seemed to be full of traffic going in both directions, riders and carriages, carts and pedestrians – and we weren’t the only aerial travellers either. Though most were keeping close to the road, and flying far lower than us, there was one exciting moment when a flock of griffons zoomed past, heading towards the east, crossing within just a quarter of a mile of us. But we emitted no significant scents on the breeze when we were like this, and even the monstrous hunters of the skies were oblivious to our presence.

I raised my head once the tremendous creatures had winged by, looking over at Jaid to catch her reaction – only to note how ashen her face had become. Beneath the ghostly transparency she ought to look pale, sure, but her skin was almost luminous.

“Are you okay?” I asked her, squeezing her hand.

She pulled her eyes up from the ground to meet mine, and juddered through gritted teeth, “Fine.”

“You want to go lower?”

“No!” she cried. “Yes! I don’t kn-know! Oh… I just – I don’t f-feel right!”

Whatever it was, I didn’t want to find out. I knew I felt fine, but my brother and sister were younger, less physically-mature by a significant margin… Was it possible that they could succumb to the nethernal effects of the wraith’s essence much more quickly than me? Or maybe it wasn’t even a matter of that… Maybe it was just that I was an arch-sorcerer, and they weren’t… Could I continue to run the risk?

“To the ground,” I said. “We need a break. Stretch your legs. Get something to eat.”

“Sure,” Jaroan said in a mocking voice – but when I looked over at him, his skin had almost the same hue as our sister’s.

Just glad to have caught it in time, I slowly descended.

If you come across this story on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it.

“I don’t like it,” Jaid whimpered, the details of the landscape below coming into sharper and sharper focus. There was a hillock beneath us, choked with small hawthorn trees, its long grasses matted like wet grey hairs. Redwings and thrushes could be seen here and there, darting from shrub to shrub in search of food.

“Just another few seconds,” I murmured, then craned my head back and spoke to the unseen chest and its retinue following along: “Zab, can you make this look like an empty hillside for a bit, please? We’re going to drop the wraith for a while.”

The moment I set the twins down on the flattest bit of the slope, I released their hands, and the opacity of their skin and clothes immediately started to return. I got the imps settled, which brought about a chorus of relieved sighs, and I graciously permitted my hellspawn to hunt the local birds and rodents, so long as they did nothing to impinge on my gremlin’s illusion. Then I limped around between my brother and sister and the chest, handing out food and drink, skipping the preserves and going straight for the perishables.

“What’s wrong with your foot, Kas?” Jaid asked, before taking a small nibble at her pastry.

Ah.

This was the first time they’d seen me moving around on my legs since I came back for them.

Jaroan was saying nothing, chewing his food in silence.

“Unhealable,” I said with a sardonic half-smile. “A small price to pay, for escaping Zyger, believe me…”

“But – an arch-druid –“

I was shaking my head. “Saw one. One of the best. Even –“

“Imrye?”

I shook my head again.

“Fangmoon?”

I smiled. “Uh huh. She couldn’t do anything – she even took the foot clean off, regrew it. The damage was too set-in for it to revert to its previous condition. I don’t think all the planar hopping helped, from what Fang said. Twenty-seven days, we were in those other worlds – but to my wounds it was more like twenty-seven years. It’s a miracle she was able to fix the rest of my injuries. My elbow was… never mind.”

Jaid kept her gaze on me for another ten seconds, then dropped it back to her tart, taking another tiny nibble.

Was it the wraith, or is it something else?

When I studied my sister’s expression, I saw the same troubled eyes she’d had in the skies, the same drawn, thin lips.

“Alright, I guess we’d better just talk about it.” I sat down on the ground between them, and looked pointedly at Jaroan.

“About wha’?” he muttered darkly.

“I’ve never seen someone with so much jam in their mouth look so moody,” I commented.

It didn’t help, and I should’ve known it wouldn’t. He half-turned away from both of us, staring at a patch of heather fifty yards off down the hillside.

“About your night-time activities.” I looked at Jaid, who was almost as morose, chewing despondently on her pastry. “What do you make of it all?”

She just offered a sad little shrug, and went on slowly moving the contents of her mouth around.

“I’ll tell you what I think.” I let myself slouch, enjoying the softness of the grass at my back. Even cold and wet, it sure beat the rocks of Magicrux Zyger. “I think our brother made some mistakes. Bad ones. Ones he regrets.”

Jaroan didn’t look back at me, but I could tell from the movement of his head that he was now looking down at the ground between his feet.

“But nothing that can’t be forgiven. The same mistakes many young people make, especially young men. Mistakes I made. Don’t think you’re the only one to struggle. We all do.”

Now he looked around. His eyes were still bleak pools of misery.

“And I think our sister’s blamed herself.” I smiled at her. “She thinks she didn’t do enough –”

“I don’t think so.”

I’d expected Jaid to interrupt me, not Jaroan, and I looked up in surprise.

* * *