Aelindra Willowshade stopped at the broken bridge because she could hear his voice again and could not see his face. She was three days into the Forest of Tall Trees, hunting a relic she could not name, and her staff had been spinning circles for most of that time. She sat on a slab of fallen stonework above the rushing water and tried to picture him. She got the shape of a jaw. She got a shoulder. Then nothing. His voice, though, said her name in her ear as clear as the river below. She pulled the letters from her satchel. Six of them, folded soft from handling, none of them sent. She had written them across four years, one every time she almost went to find him. The plan had always been the same: find him, say the thing, rule the two lands beside him the way they used to talk about. Human side and fae side, one table, one front. She could not do any of that if she could not remember what he looked like. A green hand set a wheel of yellow cheese down on the stone next to her. Aelindra did not jump. She had heard the ogre coming for a full minute. "You are crying," Grulnock Cheddarfist said. "I'm not." "Your face is wet." "That's the river." He sat. The stone complained. He cut a slice of cheese with a knife the size of her forearm and held it out. She took it because refusing an ogre's food seemed unwise. Below them, a small aqua snake with three heads drank from a pool between the rocks. A white rabbit watched from the far bank. A round, leafy creature snuffled through moss near her boot. The forest was full of small witnesses. "Who is he," Grulnock said. Not a question. A statement she could answer or not. "A man I used to know. I can hear him. I can't see him." She pressed the heel of her hand against her eye. "I think I'm losing my mind." "No." Grulnock chewed. "Voice is memory. Face is a picture. Pictures fade first. Everyone knows this." She stared at him. He did not look up from the cheese. "That's it?" "That's it." She sat with that. The staff at her side, quiet for the first time in days, tilted once against her knee and settled. Her hands stopped shaking around the letter in her lap. She was not going crazy. She had just been away too long. That was a different problem, and a solvable one. She folded the letter, put it back in the satchel, and stood. "I have to go find him," she said. "Not the relic. Him. Before the rest of him goes too." Grulnock nodded at the cheese. "Take the road east. Faster." She took it. She went.