Tromo woke into his dumb world. He was accustomed by this time to finding Ethall awake also, so he sat up and looked for her, ready to begin a day of playing the games with her that he had so come to love. She had gone. So had Conn and Feanna. He looked around frantically, but they were nowhere to be seen. He was sure that they had lain down to go to sleep just nearby to them only the night before, but now they were painfully absent. Tromo considered this. There hang the empty pot of stew. There was the black circle of soot which was all that was left of the cooking fire. It seemed to him that they had not left in a hurry, or because of trouble. There was no particular complication or drama to it: They had simply left.

He thought that Zantheus and Anthē would probably want to be informed of this, since they no longer had any guides to lead them through the forest. Each had fallen asleep on either side of him. He looked at Zantheus. He must have made it out of the Hamartia plant at some stage while they were sleeping. The knight lay almost perfectly still on his back, his hands at his side, uncloaked, breathing nearly silently. He looked at Anthē. She lay on her side, facing Tromo and Zantheus, curled up untidily in her cloak, which was strewn so that it partly covered her, and partly did not. She was snoring. He decided that he would prefer to wake up Anthē rather than Zantheus. He shuffled over to her inside his own two-cloak-thick cocoon and tapped her on the shoulder. She stirred. He did it again.

“Mmmm...” Anthē let out a mumble of disapproval. He did it again. “Not now Tromo...wake me when it’s breakfast.” He did it again. Slowly she opened her brown eyes, looking straight into his. “What is it, sweetie?” she asked him. A look of puzzlement came over Anthē’s face. “Can’t Conn or Feanna sort this out?” She pushed herself up one arm. Tromo gestured towards the abandoned pot. “Oh.” She realised what had happened. She looked at Zantheus. She had a dim memory of him finally making it out of the Hamartia plant, but it was swallowed up by the more pressing matter at hand. “Zantheus! Wake up!” she said, getting to her feet.

Zantheus sat bolt upright and began speaking at once. “Article One: Will to succeed. Article Two…” He trailed off when he remembered where he was, but he kept on reciting the Articles under his breath for a while out of habit while Anthē spoke. As she did so he noticed for the first time how utterly useless they were, how devoid of meaning they had become to him; his mouth formed each word but they did not contain any real power. This new observation sank into him like an arrow along with the news that Conn and Feanna had gone.

“...they’ve left us, Zantheus!” Anthē was saying. “We’ve been left on our own –again!” She was hysterical, just as she had been when they had lost Leukos. “How will we ever get out of the forest now? We’ve been left on our own again! We’ve been left on our own, Zantheus, abandoned!”

“Try to stay calm,” said Zantheus. “We have to stay calm, Anthē.”

“But what are we going to do?”

“Well, first we should make sure we are not under threat from anything or anyone. We do not know what has happened to Conn and Feanna.”

“Do you see anyone else here?” said Anthē angrily. “They’ve left us, plain and simple! Just like Leukos did –first him, now them!”

“Calm down, Anthē. We know that we are meant to be heading east. If we continue east, sooner or later we are bound to come the end of the forest.”

“But we don’t know the forest, Zantheus,” moaned Anthē. “How are we meant to keep heading east? What if we end up somewhere dangerous, or if we come to another Hamartia plant? They’ve abandoned us!” She sat on the ground with her head in her hands, racked by anxiety. “They said they were helpers! ‘Wayguides’! They said they would show us the way through! You were right, we should never have trusted them in the first place!”

“It will be alright,” said Zantheus. “You still have Tromo and me. You must try to stay calm.” He felt vindicated in his original suspicions of three forest-dwellers but this was no time to gloat. He started emptying out and packing away the cooking things into his bag. “We should just try to continue heading east.”

“I don’t know, Zantheus,” said Anthē. She was resolute in her pessimism. “I just don’t know. We’ve been left on our own again...”

“Come on,” said Zantheus. “Stop saying that. We have not come this far to give up now.” To her surprise, he offered her his hand. Slightly taken aback, she took it and he helped her up. Equally surprisingly, he then picked up Tromo and began to walk towards the dawn, in what he thought was an easterly direction. Anthē went after him.

“Zantheus...” she said, temporarily distracted from her breakdown, “um... are you feeling alright?” She was not used to him being this helpful.

“Yes. I am feeling fine, thank you,” he said.

They walked for some time and Anthē kept stride with his determined steps. He had a very serious look on his face, and a strange composure. He looked as though he was certain that he knew where he was going.

Maybe he did, she thought.

But this soon turned out not to be the case. What was most depressing was that there was a small patch of blackened grass where Conn had made a fire the night before, and somehow they kept coming back to it. They walked for hours in increasingly anxious silence, and Zantheus was sure that he was going in a single, straight line, but they kept revisiting the remains of their cooking fire. The light and the trees were playing tricks on him, and somehow instead of a straight line he was only managing to walk in a very big circle. The third time they came back to the fire, Anthē lost whatever of Zantheus’s composure she had been able to emulate.

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“Zantheus! We’re lost! This is the third time we’ve been here! We’re not getting anywhere!”

“Please try and stay calm, Anthē.”

“We’ll wander this forest forever!”

“Do not say that!”

Anthē was startled. Zantheus had shouted those last words.

“Anthē... I am sorry... I did not mean to lose my temper.”

His shout had shaken her up, but she took a deep breath and tried to gather herself. She still needed to give voice to her fears. “What are we going to do, Zantheus?”

“We must keep walking. I know that it seems pointless, but it is the best thing we can do in our situation. Even if it takes us a very long time to get out, we will get out. We will get back.”

“Get back? Back where?”

“Oh...no, I mean, I will get back. Back to Qereth. Not even this forest can stop me doing that. But you will get there with me. We have food enough for a good deal more days yet, and if that runs out, we shall live off of the forest until we find our way out of it. Conn and Feanna managed it. They said we were near the border. At least we know the border is close by.”

“But what if they were lying?”

Zantheus nearly got angry with Anthē again for being so changeable –what had happened to her unquestioning trust of Conn and Feanna? He held his tongue, however, and kept walking on. It was the only thing he could do. Another hour passed. He thought he recognised some of the trees from before. No fire yet.

Instead, this time the three of them spotted something else.

“Hey, can you see that?” asked Anthē.

A figure, another person, here in the forest with them, just over there... Anthē ran to see who it was.

It was Leukos.

He was sat in his usual late-night posture with his back to a tree, repeating something over and over as he wrote:

“Got to get it down. I was so sure I’d caught her this time. I was so sure. I was so close. I was so sure I’d caught her this time.”

His eyes were playing their usual trick of looking somewhere other than his manuscript, but now they only stared blankly straight ahead in front of him and were glazed over. He took no notice of Zantheus, or Anthē, or Tromo. Anthē’s initial reaction on identifying him was to get angry, she wanted to shout at him immediately for having abandoned them before, to question him as to how he could have done such a thing to them, but she discerned that something was wrong. Leukos did not usually talk to himself, out loud at least. There were loose pages littered around him on the forest floor. Even Zantheus, who had always suspected that Leukos was to some degree a madman, could see that he was behaving in an even more unorthodox way than normal. Tromo gathered up one of the loose pages. He presented it to Anthē. To her profound surprise, it was entirely unreadable, illegible. In some places she could see that words had been written on it but they had been crossed over in the same ink, turning the page into a dripping black mess. She handed it to Zantheus.

Then she addressed the writer. “Leukos, where in Mashal have you been? What’s going on?”

He turned his glazed-over look on her, but carried on repeating himself. “I was so sure I’d caught her. I was so close. I was so sure I’d caught her.”

“Caught who? Where have you been, Leukos? Who did you nearly catch?”

“Her. I was so sure-”

“Who is ‘her’, Leukos? Who are you talking about?”

“The person I was chasing. I was so sure I’d caught her. I was so close. I was so sure I’d caught-”

“Leukos,” Zantheus cut him off, “we are lost in this forest.” He was not going to beat around the bush. If Leukos was going to talk nonsense, fine, but he was not going to let that be a hindrance to them. Now that they had found him again he was going to make himself useful. “We need you to show us the way out,” he said firmly.

At this Leukos stood up, though his glazed look did not leave him. He started walking very fast in what may have been a wholly random direction. But he was walking all the same. For want of any other plan, the others followed him. Suddenly their old guide was back. But this was not enough for Anthē. What had happened? Where had he been? Why was he talking to himself? She pressed him with more questions as they went, diverting the flow of words when she could. She had known Leukos to act strangely before, but never as strangely as this. And never before had he been so talkative. She decided to take advantage of this unprecedented loquaciousness.

“Are we going the right way, Leukos? Do you know the way out?”

The stream of words altered its course for a moment. “The way out? If I followed you, would you show me the way out? What do you mean by the ‘way out’? I was so sure I’d caught her this time. I was so close. Got to get it down.”

That was a new phrase. “Get what down, Leukos?” said Anthē.

“Events, happening. One thing after another. That’s all this is, isn’t it? This is just a picture. I was so sure I’d caught her this time.”

She asked him a question she had asked once before. “What are you writing, Leukos?”

“Can’t tell you that. I am alone, I write. How can I show you? I was so sure I’d caught her this time. This is just a picture. Got to look through the words. Got to get it down. I was so-”

“Why do you want to catch this person, Leukos? Why couldn’t you catch her?”

“Only human, Anthē. Don’t have the right ink, you see. I was so-”

This time Zantheus was the one to interrupt. “What good is this doing us, Anthē? He is talking nonsense.”

Anthē answered him at once. “Or maybe it’s a puzzle, Zantheus, did you ever think of that? Maybe he’s giving us a puzzle?”

“It is not a puzzle,” said Zantheus. “He has gone mad. Or madder.”

“He might not have,” persisted Anthē. A thought occurred to her. Maybe she should just ask him outright. “Leukos, are you mad?”

To surprise, he stopped dead in his tracks.

“We shall see,” he said.

They waited for his ramblings to resume, but they had stooped as well.

“Why have we stopped?” asked Zantheus. “Keep moving, we want to get out of this forest.”

“No, listen,” said Leukos, shutting his eyes. “Here they come.”