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“Did they win?” Lucan panted. “I didn’t think they won.”

“We’re here,” Biri-Daar. “But Iriani is not.”

“I saw him fall,” Remy said.

Kithri was nodding. “Me too. He was already dead.”

Looking out over the mass of hobgoblins and tieflings, Biri-Daar said, “So should we be. The shadowravens do not follow, the sorrowsworn retreat to their lair. The rest come only halfway. Why?”

Lucan was looking at the road that stretched ahead of them, from the lip of the gorge into a misty and forested middle distance. “I have a guess,” he said.

Behind them, the tieflings sang. Biri-Daar looked at them with hate plain on her face. When they had caught their breath, though, she led them away and would say no more about their passage across the Bridge of Iban Ja.

Not even when Kithri tried to provoke her. “You weren’t quite yourself out there, paladin,” she said lightly after they had walked a few hours into the woods. “Shouting, demonstrating …”

“It got those tieflings into a frenzy, that’s certain,” Lucan added.

Biri-Daar raised a hand, palm out toward them. “Do not try to bait me. If Iriani’s death is on my head, I will know it. I will repent of it. Keverel, I would speak with you a moment.”

The cleric followed her a little way apart from the group. The rest of them walked in a loose group. They had no horses, no packs; they would be living from what they could forage until the next settlement, and none of them knew where that settlement might be. “When I passed through here some years ago,” Lucan said, “there was a trading post near where the Crow Road emerged from these woods.”

“Bring on the dancing girls,” Kithri said with as much sarcasm as she could muster.

“Your tongue is somewhat dulled of late,” Lucan said. “I fear for your health.”

“I fear for yours if you don’t hold your tongue,” she snapped.

Remy saw the stresses pulling at the group. He said nothing. It was not yet his role to have something to say. He walked. They all walked, in small groups that shifted and broke and reformed as they rose away from the Gorge of Noon into the highland forest on its eastern rim. None of them had much to say because each of them had much to think. Iriani, dying, weighed on their minds.

“These woods are touched,” Lucan said sometime later, when dusk was nearly total and they had resigned themselves to a night of sleeping rough.

“Feywild?” Keverel said softly.

Lucan nodded, looking around. “They will show themselves when they wish to,” he said.

Which was just at the moment of full dark, when Remy could no longer see a trace of color in the woods around him or on his own clothes. “Travelers,” came a voice from the trees to their left. “It is forbidden to traverse this part of the road without the permission of the Lord of the Wood.”

Lucan answered first. “I can see you, elf. And you can see me. Come out and let us talk like civilized beings.”

“You know you don’t belong here,” the elf said, appearing at the side of the road. “The stink of the city is in your clothes.”

“I belong where I choose to go,” Lucan said.

“No. You may choose to go anywhere. But you may not choose whether the people already there decide you belong.” The elf winked at them, sporting cruelty in his smile. “Same for your half-breed who didn’t make it this far. It’s the curse of mixed blood, I’m afraid.”

There might have been blows exchanged then. On both sides hands fell to sword hilts and eyes locked, gauging defenses and reflexes and—most importantly—intent. More elves appeared from the trees.

Then another figure on horseback spoke, and everyone else present realized that he had been there for the entire exchange even though none of them had heard him approach. “Easy, Leini. They’ve lost a friend,” he said. “They shouldn’t have to endure your baiting after that.”

“This is none of your business, Paelias,” the elf Leini said.

“I believe it is. These travelers, who have spent their day fighting the tieflings and killing off the cambion magus of the old bridge,