The secret meeting happened behind the tarantula enclosure.
Torra had chosen the location specifically because it was the one corner of the settlement that adults passed through with the least frequency, the smell of the enclosure creating a natural deterrent to casual foot traffic.
He had gathered them after dinner while the celebration for Sena was still running at the Sequoia tree, slipping away one by one with the technique he had developed over the years of living in a settlement where everyone knew everyone and disappearing required actual planning.
Jenna arrived first. Then Maya, still holding the piece of Glowfruit she had been eating. Then Nico, who had been in the middle of a conversation with Gringo and had exited it with an excuse that Gringo had clearly not believed but had chosen not to pursue.
Then Sia, quiet and quick, appearing from the direction of Harold's house with the composed efficiency of someone who had been ready and waiting.
Torra looked at them.
"The baby needs a gift." He said.
"We have gifts." Jenna said. "I made one."
"Not from the marketplace." Torra said. "Something from somewhere else. Something nobody else in Eryndor has."
They looked at each other.
"Winterly." Maya said. Her eyes had the particular brightness of someone who had been waiting for an opportunity to suggest something.
"Winterly." Torra confirmed. "I heard one of the merchants talking about the wool market there. Sheep wool. Really soft. The fluffy kind." He paused. "Baby Sena should have the fluffiest blanket."
"Brother Leigh will say no." Jenna said.
"Which is why." Torra said. "We don't ask Brother Leigh."
The silence that followed had the quality of children collectively deciding something they already knew the answer to.
"We ask a merchant." Nico said. "For a ride."
"The northeastern road." Torra said. "There was a wool merchant at the gate this morning. He's heading back to Winterly. We pay him for the ride, we go to the market, we buy the wool, we come back before dinner tomorrow."
"Brother Leigh tracks us through the necklaces." Sia said.
"He tracks us inside the barrier." Torra said. "Once we're outside with a merchant on the road, we're just traveling. People travel."
They all looked at the necklaces at their collars.
Then at each other.
"The fluffiest blanket." Maya said.
"For Sena." Torra said.
"Fine." Jenna said.
•••••••••
The merchant's name was Pol. He was a wool trader, returning to Winterly's recovering market with an empty cart and no particular reason to refuse five children and their combined salary coins when they appeared at the northeastern gate the following morning with the coordinated casualness of people trying to look like they had been planning this openly for days.
He looked at them.
He looked at the coins.
He looked at the gate.
"Your parents know." He said.
"Elder Elka knows we like to travel." Torra said. Which was technically true.
Pol looked at them for another moment.
The coins were generous. The road was safe, well-lit, the smoothest trade route he had used in twenty years of moving goods through Philantria. Five children who clearly lived in Eryndor and therefore were clearly not the kind of children who needed protecting from ordinary circumstances.
"In the cart." He said. "You stay in the cart until we reach the market."
They climbed in.
The cart moved through the northeastern gate and onto the road.
••••••••••
I was working on the crib.
The joint work was close to finished, the last section of the railing coming together in the way the previous sections had, the grain of the wood following the direction I had been persuading it toward all morning.
Torra's absence from his position beside me was noted somewhere in the background awareness I maintained for the settlement, filed alongside the noise from the marketplace and the brewery's temperature reading and the general sense of Eryndor functioning correctly.
Torra wandered sometimes. He always came back.
The morning passed.
The celebration for Sena continued at the Sequoia tree. Elficia was there, Sena in her arms, the settlement moving past them in the particular orbit that new babies generated, everyone finding a reason to be nearby.
Elfaren had stopped pacing entirely and was sitting beside Elficia with the expression of someone who had been tensely waiting for something for a very long time and had fully arrived at the other side of it.
I finished the railing joint and set the chisel down and picked up the plane.
Then Favio came around the corner of the outer residential zone at a pace that was not his usual pace.
He was pale.
I looked at him.
"The children." He said. He stopped. Started again. "Torra. Maya, Jenna, Sia, Nico. They left this morning on a merchant's cart. Northeastern road toward Winterly." He stopped again. His hands were at his sides and not entirely still.
"The merchant came back." He said. "Alone. He's at the gate. He said something took them. On the road."
The chisel hit the ground.
The merchant was at the northeastern gate with the expression of a man whose body had completed a journey that his mind was still trying to catch up to.
He was sitting on the ground beside his empty cart, the horse standing calm beside him in the particular way horses stood when they had been through something their rider hadn't recovered from yet.
I crouched in front of him.
He looked at me.
"Tell me." I said.
His voice came in pieces at first. The road had been fine. Clear, well-lit, the children in the cart behind him, the horse moving at a steady pace. They had been perhaps four kilometers from Eryndor's northeastern edge when the air had changed.
The way he described it was the way people described things they didn't have vocabulary for, reaching for comparisons that almost fit and didn't quite.
Like the temperature dropped.
Like the light went wrong.
Like something arrived that was too large for the space it arrived in.
He had turned on the seat and the children were gone.
No sound. No warning. The cart behind him simply empty.
He had sat there for long enough that the horse had started moving back toward Eryndor on its own.
I listened to all of it without moving.
Then I stood up.
The aura came out without me managing it. The particular release that happened when the thing being contained was too large for the container. I felt the people nearest to me step back without looking at them. I felt the temperature in the immediate vicinity drop in the way it dropped when what I was feeling had nowhere else to go.
My face was still.
That was the part that was wrong, the part that the people who had been in Eryndor long enough to read it correctly would recognize as worse than any other expression I could have produced. Not anger that showed. The other kind. The kind that had nowhere to go yet and was waiting.
I turned and walked to the northeastern road.
And....
Four kilometers out.
I stood at the point the merchant had described and looked at the road and the terrain around it and extended my senses outward in every direction.
The necklaces.
I reached for the tracking function, the passive location system I had built into every artifact, the one that had been running continuously since I distributed them. Five signals. All five present. All five outside Eryndor's barrier.
All five motionless at a location that was not Winterly.
That was not anywhere on the northeastern road.
The location that registered for all five was Medalline.
I looked at the road.
And found it. The blocking field, embedded in the road surface at this exact point, the mana structure of it pressed into the stone so the approach from Eryndor's direction wouldn't register it as anything but road until you were standing on top of it.
I crouched and put my hand on the surface.
The construction was not subtle. It was powerful. The kind of power that didn't need to be subtle because it was operating with the confidence of something that had never expected to be examined after the fact.
The same intensity as the Winterly portal's output had been. The same signature that had disrupted my illusion spell in the nexus chamber.
Demon lord.
Not a general. Not a sent force. The specific mana signature of the demon lord himself, the origin point of the working.
He had been on this road.
He had waited here, on this road, with a blocking field that suppressed the necklace tracking from the moment the cart crossed it, and he had taken five children who had slipped out of Eryndor on a merchant's cart to buy wool for a baby.
I stood up.
The bloodlust that came out of me hit the surrounding forest and the birds left their branches in every direction simultaneously.
I looked at the road.
At Medalline's direction.
At the location the necklaces were registering, five signals, all still, all alive, all inside the palace that had been my home for eight years and my cage for the same eight years.
The demon lord had not come for Eryndor.
He had come for what I would do when he took what was mine.
I understood the play completely.
I looked at my hands.
Then I started walking back toward Eryndor.
Not because I was retreating.
Because what came next required preparation and not impulse, and the difference between those two things was the difference between getting the children back and everything else.
The anger was still there.
Cold. Absolute. The patient kind.
Its turn had finally come.