“Lord Alton has been pacing a trench between the tower and your tent, waiting for you to wake up,” the mender said. “Do you feel up to working with him? If not, I can put him off…”

“No, no. I feel good,” Dale said.

A little later she slipped through the tent flaps and blinked at the sun in her eyes, and found herself face to face with Alton. He had been waiting.

“Uh…” he began.

Dale looked him over. He was as disheveled as the day before, and she decided she would have to do something about it. “Good morning.”

“Morning. You can come to the tower?”

“Yes, of course, that’s what I’m here for.” He turned and started walking toward the tower as if expecting her to follow. “But first I want to look in on Plover.”

Alton halted and turned about. Was that guilt on his face? She soon saw why, for when they reached the pickets, Alton’s gelding, Night Hawk, was so overjoyed to see his Rider that he nearly yanked his picket stake right out of the ground. Not only had Alton neglected himself, but his horse as well. She watched as he patted the gelding, looking abashed, then she moved on to her own Plover. She checked that the mare was rubbed down, comfortable, and had enough water, and joined Alton where he awaited her on the other side of the picket.

He said nothing, but strode off again, expecting her to follow. She did so, shaking her head. The Alton of old would have asked how she was, joked with her. However, this was not the Alton of old, but a haunted specter of him. She had no idea of what had befallen him while he was trapped in Blackveil. Perhaps with more time, he would come around; if not unchanged, at least more like his old self.

When they reached the wall, Alton took up the stance that was becoming all too familiar—his hands on his hips, and his gaze hard, as if he could break through the stone facade by pure will alone.

“You know about Merdigen?” he asked her.

“Garth filled me in. He’s a magical something-or-other.”

For the first time, humor lit Alton’s eyes. “I wouldn’t say that to his face.”

“And you’re sure he’ll be there?”

Alton shrugged. “It’s where he exists. Did Garth describe the tower to you?”

Dale paused a moment before replying. Garth described the tower as ‘’impossible,” that there were vast plains of grass within, an image she found difficult to conceptualize. “He tried,” she said.

“Yes.” Alton rubbed the bristles on his chin. “It takes seeing it to understand. Are you ready?”

“Yep. If the tower lets me in, what do you want me to do?”

“Get any information about the wall’s condition you can from Merdigen. Ask him if there is a way to circumvent the guardians so I can enter.”

“All right.” With some trepidation, she approached the tower, the windowless, doorless tower that nonetheless admitted Green Riders. She half listened to Alton’s instructions about how to enter, trying to hold her skepticism about walking through walls at bay.

She stroked the cold, rough stone. It felt ordinary enough. Then she patted it soundly. Definitely granite.

“Are you sure this will work?” she asked Alton.

“We won’t know until you try.”

She took a deep breath, touched her Rider brooch, and sidled toward the tower wall. She stretched her hand out to the wall, expecting to jar it on stone, but it sank right in. She stared incredulously at it, then said to Alton, “Wish me luck.”

MEETING MERDIGEN

Passing through the wall was pretty much as Garth had described, like floating through water, a mere moment of breath holding and darkness. But during Dale’s passage, voices rasped against her mind; distant murmurs. She could discern no words, but she felt from the voices curiosity and suspicion, a questioning of her presence, and lingering sorrow. So much sorrow…She gave a mental shudder and the voices whispered away.

She exhaled in relief when she emerged into the open air of the tower chamber, the wall clinging to her, then snapping away. On impulse she turned and rapped her knuckles on the section of wall she just walked through. Yep, pure solid granite. There was no sign of distortion in the stone, no hint of fluidity. She wasn’t sure if she believed what she had just done, but here she stood in the tower. The process had been as effortless as Garth claimed, but it nevertheless jangled her nerves. He had said nothing about voices. Maybe it had been her imagination.

A source of light that she could not identify dimly lit the tower interior, leaving darkness to fill in the edges of the chamber and the ceiling above. There were no grass plains she could detect, and she wondered if Garth had been imbibing a bit too much when he imagined them. In fact, but for a few details, the place was pretty ordinary. To her right was a big hearth, soot-darkened by many fires, its cooking irons and utensils rusty and strung with spiderwebs.

To her left along the wall was a stone basin with a brass fish, covered with the verdigris of age, perched on its lip. Garth had told her about this marvel as well, and when she passed her hand under the fish, water spouted from its mouth and poured into the basin. At least this hadn’t been a fancy on his part. Dale smiled, letting the water plash into her palm. Her special ability was to find water—specifically water born of the earth. Sometimes she could smell a good rain on the horizon, but her ability was tied groundward.

There were dowsers in her family in Adolind Province, but her ability went deeper. At least that’s what she’d found out when it had emerged after her first year as a Rider. She had been on a message errand to an island village on the verge of dying off during a drought. Most of the islanders’ wells had gone dry, and the rest were so low they’d turned bad, making countless members of the community ill. Without reliable and safe fresh water, Saltshake Island could not support a permanent population.