"I will speak the Way to Aenir and you must repeat it silently inside your head," said Ebbitt. "You must also concentrate on each of the seven colors at the right time. I will throw a ray from my own Sunstone to show you. Do you understand?"
"Yes," said Milla. This was another adventure worthy of Ulla Strong-Arm. These Chosen especially the ones conspiring against Tal were very dangerous, and powerful. The more she learned of their secrets, the better. She would return to the Ruin Ship not only with a Sunstone, but knowledge for the good of all the clans.
Ebbitt began to speak, and Milla concentrated on his words.
Color spread across her, but she kept her eyes open, watching for Ebbitt's color changes. She could feel the colors change in the Sunstone, and each color produced a different sensation on her skin.
It wasn't at all like going to sleep and falling into a dream, as she thought it might be. As each color passed her eyes, it changed the world a little. Ebbitt's face faded, and his Spiritshadow. They became patterns, and then blurs of light. Everything became a rainbow, so bright that Milla couldn't help blinking.
Then the colors started to separate again, and she saw other patterns. Her skin felt hot and cold at the same time, in different patches. Her toes tingled, and she felt as if she were falling, suddenly dizzy.
She could no longer hear Ebbitt's voice. For a moment she felt a stab of fear, as if without his words she might be lost between the two worlds.
Then the patches of color became sharper and sharper, solidifying into a bright blue band that filled the upper part of her vision. The light dimmed a little, but was still bright.
Milla closed her eyes. Sound suddenly hit her, a musical, happy sound, like a bone pipe played in trills.
Wind blew across her face. Milla opened her eyes. She stood upright on something soft and springy that looked a bit like long ice lichen. There were tall plants near her, larger than anything she had ever seen. Small colored animals with wings flew among the plants, making the whistling noises.
It was bright. There was a huge light in the sky, a hot, fierce light. Milla started to look up at it, but Tal was suddenly there, shielding her face with his hand.
"Don't look," he said. "That's the sun."
Milla looked at Tal instead. She recognized him, but he looked different. He was shorter and slighter, and his skin glowed with a soft luster. The Sunstone ring on his finger caught the light and surrounded his hand with tiny rainbows.
She looked at her own hands and saw that they glowed, too, and her fingers seemed longer. "Am I me?" she asked in wonder.
"You are what you are here," said Tal. "Aenir is a realm of spirit and magic, and we are part of it now, less solid. Try to jump."
He jumped himself, and went soaring up to grab a branch, easily three or four times as high as Milla. Then he moved back down, falling slowly, like a feather.
Milla flexed her knees and saw her sword lying on the ground. She picked it up, stroking the soft, long lichen on the way.
"Grass," said Tal, seeing her puzzled look. "It's good to lie on in the sun."
Milla put the sword through her belt and took a practice leap. That carried her almost into one of the big plants.
"Watch out for the trees!" laughed Tal.
"Trees," repeated Milla wonderingly. "We have a story about trees, before the Veil was made and the Ice came. I didn't think they were like this."
"This is a forest," said Tal. "Lots of trees together."
"It is good," said Milla, sniffing the wind. There was no scent of cold stone here. The only troubling thing was the light, but that was just habit. Her eyes must have changed with everything else, because she felt no need to squint.
"The only thing is," Tal said, "we should have come out at where we normally do, on the Chosen Plain. It's one of the few places that always stays the same, and we have houses and stores and so on there."
"We can walk there," said Milla, unconcerned. "But I don't know where it is," Tal confessed. "I'm lost."
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Instinctively, Tal looked for his shadowguard, to ask it where the Chosen Enclave was. Once he knew that, he would be able to work out where they should go.
But as Tal turned, his shadow moved with him. Just like a natural shadow. Too much like a natural shadow, in fact. The shadowguard had never been that good at mimicking an ordinary shadow.
Tal bent down to touch it, and felt grass rather than the cool touch of Shadowflesh.
"It's gone," he said numbly. "I've got my natural shadow back."
"Good," said Milla. She was looking around, nose wrinkling. Something had disturbed her, though she couldn't quite work out what it was.
"You don't understand," said Tal, shaking his head in disbelief and sorrow. "It's been with me all my life. I knew it would go when it was time for me to get a Spiritshadow, but I thought it would wait till I was ready to let it go! It could have at least said good-bye…"
Something hissed from behind one of the trees. The warning hiss of the shadowguard. Then a small, furry, but somehow recognizable animal sprang out, jumped up on Tal's chest, licked him across the face, and then jumped away again.
Milla had her knife in her hand, ready to throw, but she hesitated. Before she could change her mind, whatever it was disappeared at high speed through the trees.
"Was that it?" she asked hesitantly. "No longer shadow?"
"They're not shadows in Aenir, not until we bind them and take them back," replied Tal, wiping his face and his eyes with his sleeve. "I guess… I guess it always liked being a Dattu because it was one here."
He shook his head a few times, as if to clear it, then looked down at his natural shadow again. He felt very alone without his shadowguard. It had saved him countless times from danger and embarrassment and difficulty. Now all he had was a useless shadow.
An almost useless shadow, he corrected himself, because he would use it as part of a trap to catch some creature of Aenir and turn it into a Spirit-shadow to take back to the Castle.
Milla was still poised in the clearing between the trees, a troubled look on her face.
"Something is happening," she said. "Listen!"
Tal stood still and listened. At first, all he could hear was the wind in the branches above him. Then he heard it, too. Distant thunder, which was slowly growing closer.
"Thunder," he said. "That means lightning, too."
"Lightning?" Milla asked. "What is that?"
"Um, hard to explain," said Tal. He'd only seen it in Aenir, for lightning did not pass through the Veil on the Dark World. But it did strike the towers, and he had often heard the thunder that accompanied lightning, even inside the Castle. The lectors had also given several lessons about lightning, and how it could be mimicked with Light magic.
The Icecarls would hear thunder, too, but they wouldn't know of its connection with lightning, because they would never see it. "Lightning is kind of concentrated light that comes down from the sky. You can work out how far away the lightning is by counting the time between the flash and the sound of the thunder."
"I can't see any flash," said Milla. "There are too many trees "
She stopped in midsentence, because off in the distance a tree was slowly moving. Not just swaying from side to side, but actually walking.
Tal and Milla jumped at the same time, as a ripple spread through the grass under their feet. The closest tree shivered, and somehow stretched a little taller. One of its exposed roots flexed, and then pulled out of the ground with a popping sound.
"The trees, they walk?" asked Milla. She seemed more pleased at the notion than afraid.
"Not usually," replied Tal suspiciously, stepping back. "Though in Aenir, who knows?"
All the trees around them were uprooting themselves. They swayed and rolled, but somehow didn't fall. Tal and Milla backed away from the closest one, even though it made no threatening movements. When enough of its root system was clear, all the roots wriggled like thousands of tiny legs and the tree started slowly moving away from them.
All the trees were walking. They were heading off in every direction except toward the storm.
Walking away from the sound of thunder, which was getting closer with every passing moment.
"The trees are fleeing," said Milla. "From the thunder?"
"Maybe," said Tal. The forest had cleared out behind them, as trees shook and swayed, shedding leaves and branches in their haste to depart. "Sometimes things happen in Aenir for no reason."