Chapter 11: The Mirewood Swallows the Path

The Mirewood announced itself the way certain people do — without introduction, simply by becoming present. One moment the path wound through ordinary woodland, scrubby and particular, with blackthorn hedging its edges and the smell of wet peat underfoot. The next, the trees were silver.

Not silver as a manner of speaking. Silver as a material fact: bark the colour and approximate texture of old mirror-glass, each trunk catching what light there was and returning it altered, shifted into something cooler and more ambiguous than the grey morning we had brought with us. The transition was not gradual. I looked down at my boots to navigate a root, looked up again, and the Greywood was behind us, and the Mirewood was not.

"Ah," said Perenthia, with the tone of a woman confirming a hypothesis she had been quietly excited about for some time.