Chapter 78

I had expected walls. Every place I had ever been kept in, or let out of, had walls.

Ellisar had none. The grey trees only went on getting larger and further apart, with water running in stone channels beside the paths, a sound like someone turning pages in the next room. Then I looked up.

The city was in the trees. Not on them, the way a crow’s nest is on a branch: in them, as if the wood had been asked, a long time ago and very politely, to make room. Rooms opened out of the great trunks thirty feet up and sixty and a hundred, with round windows lit gold. Stairs wound up round the trunks, and walkways ran from tree to tree so fine they looked like spider-silk with the light on it. Nobody shouted. Somewhere above me a child laughed and was hushed, and further off a single voice was singing something with a great many verses, as if there were no hurry about any of it.

People stopped on the paths to watch us pass. They looked, and then at one another, and stood asid