The trees swallowed them both before the town's last ambient sound had finished leaving the air.
He did not land in the clearing. He landed in the deep part — the specific, old-growth, no-paths-here, bark-and-root-floor, canopy-closed-overhead deep of a forest that had not seen a person since before the cultivation wars and whose floor was soft earth and old moss and the flat, quiet, wild ambient of a place that was not a town and not a sect and was not maintained by anyone.
He set her down.
Not gently — the flat, present, both-hands, controlled descent of a man moving from carry to position, her knees meeting the earth with the soft, compressed, moss-and-soil yield of a forest floor that had decades of compressed leaf matter under it.
She stirred.
