Sir Roland Brightshield had lost the child three nights ago, and he had not slept since. He climbed the rope ladder to the fourth bough before dawn, sword strapped tight, hands steady only because he had drilled them steady an hour before. Somewhere in the treehouse district, tangled across a hundred trunks and a thousand walkways, a stolen heir was hidden. He had sworn to guard the boy. He had failed once already. He would not fail twice. He worked the district the only way he knew: door by door, branch by branch. By midday he had cleared six platforms and learned nothing. The rope bridges swayed under his boots. Merchants shut their shutters when they saw his tabard. He was running out of hours, and he knew it. If the kidnappers moved the boy past the outer canopy, he would never find him. He stopped on a narrow landing and pressed his palm flat against the bark to keep his hand from shaking. A boy stepped out of the shadow of a doorway. He was small, dark-haired, dressed in a red coat too fine for this part of the district. He said his name was Lucien Blackwell. He said he had seen the knight climbing since sunrise and he knew what Roland was looking for. In his hands he turned a brass prayer wheel, the cylinder clicking softly on its stand. He said the men who took the heir had traded the wheel to his uncle two nights ago for silence and a rope. He said the wheel came from the great tree fortress at the district's heart, the one crowned with watchful platforms and ringed with iron spikes. He said the child was inside it. Roland knelt so their eyes were level. He asked the boy why he was telling a stranger. Lucien said his uncle would sell the next child too, and he did not want to grow up in a house that did that. Roland took the prayer wheel. The brass was warm. He believed him. He stood, faced the massive silhouette of the fortress rising above the canopy, and understood the shape of the next problem. He had a location now. He also had a keep full of armed men, a single sword, and a boy at his side he had not asked for and could not send home.

Roland studied the great tree from a walkway two hundred paces out. The fortress rose above the canopy on a trunk wider than a house. Iron spikes ringed the lower platform. Armed men paced the rails. The front gate was a slab of banded oak at the end of a single rope bridge. One man with a sword could not cross that bridge and live, and if he tried, the child inside would be dead before he reached the second landing. Lucien crouched beside him and said nothing, which Roland took as agreement. "We need another way in," Roland said. Lucien pointed down through the branches to a sagging roof half-swallowed by moss. A forgotten hut clung to a lower bough, its shutters broken, its door hanging on one hinge. "The old priest lived there," Lucien said. "He used to bless the tree on solstice. They let him through the gate." They climbed down. The hut smelled of damp wood and mice. Inside, a rack stood against the back wall, and on it hung layered robes stitched with gold trim, a stole, and a heavy outer vestment. Dust coated the shoulders. Roland lifted the outer robe. It would fit him. Lucien said, "Solstice is tonight. They'll expect someone." "They'll expect the priest they know," Roland said. "Not me." A voice behind them said, "Then bring someone they'll look at instead." A woman stood in the broken doorway. Dark hair, a red dancing dress, veil pinned back. She said her name was Theodora Slyshade. She said she had followed the boy down from the upper walkway because he moved like someone with a plan. Roland put a hand on his sword. She raised both of hers, empty. "I dance at feasts," she said. "Guards watch dancers. They stop watching doors." Roland asked what she wanted. She said a name. She said there was a man inside the fortress who kept a list, and she needed one line off it. She would not say more. Roland weighed the bridge, the gate, the child, the hours left. He put on the robe. He gave Lucien the brass prayer wheel to carry at his side like an acolyte. Theodora tied a scarf across her hair and picked up a small drum from the hut's floor. They crossed the rope bridge at dusk. Theodora walked ahead, drum tapping, hips loose. The two guards at the gate looked at her and kept looking. Roland lowered his head under the hood and rolled the wheel. Lucien walked at his elbow, quiet. One guard laughed at something Theodora said. The other pulled the gate open a hand's width and waved the priest through without a second glance. The gate closed behind them. Roland was inside the stronghold, robed, unarmed at the belt, with a boy and a stranger and a child somewhere above him in the dark.

The gate thudded shut behind them. Roland lowered the hood a finger's width and looked up. The trunk rose through three landings he could see and more he could not. Doors ringed each level. Ladders climbed between them. He had no idea which door held the child, and a robed priest wandering every hall would be a dead priest before the hour was out. He turned the prayer wheel once to keep his hands moving and thought. A steward in a green sash crossed the lower platform and bowed to the robe. He asked if the father would bless the household roster before the solstice rite. Roland nodded without speaking. The steward led them to a side room where a book sat on a stand, bound in dark boards and wrapped in chain. He unlocked the chain, opened the book to a marked page, and stepped back with his head down. Roland looked at the open page. Names. Rooms. A guard rotation written in a tight hand. Lucien leaned in as if to steady the wheel at his master's belt. His eyes moved down the page. "Third landing," he said under his breath. "East door. Two guards, one inside. The line above it says nurse." He did not point. He did not linger. He stepped back and folded his hands. Roland traced a slow cross above the book and murmured a blessing he half remembered from a chapel years ago. The steward bowed again. Theodora, waiting in the doorway with her drum tucked under one arm, asked the steward where a dancer might warm up before the rite. The steward's eyes went to her, then away, then back. He offered to show her the hall himself. Before she followed him out, she leaned past the stand and turned two pages back. Her finger stopped on a line. Her face did not change. She closed the book, let the chain fall across the cover, and walked out with the steward at her shoulder. Roland waited until their steps faded. He turned the book back to the roster page and read the third landing entry twice, then a third time, until the room numbers sat in his head like drills he had run since boyhood. East door. Nurse. Two out, one in. He closed the book. His hands were steady for the first time in three nights. Lucien watched him. "You know where he is," the boy said. It was not a question. Roland nodded once. Above them a bell rang for the solstice, and boots began to move on the landings overhead — the guard rotation the book had just named, shifting exactly on the hour. Roland had the room. He also had a fortress full of armed men about to change posts on every stair between him and the door he needed.

Roland caught Theodora in the warm-up hall before she reached the drum stand. The steward had gone to fetch water. Lucien kept watch at the door. Roland took her wrist, not hard, and turned her toward the wall. "You read a second page," he said. "Tell me what was on it." Theodora's eyes went to his hand, then to his face. She did not pull away. "The east door on the third landing is bait," she said. "The nurse line is written in the same ink as the guard rotation. Fresh. The rest of the book is older. Someone wrote that entry today." Roland felt the drills drop out of his hands. Third landing, east door. He had run the numbers until they sat clean in his head, and the numbers were a trap. "Where is the child, then." "Two landings higher. West side. A locked room next to a cell." She met his eyes. "There is a prisoner in the cell. A scholar. His name is on the roster under kitchen deliveries, which is a lie. I know the name. I have been looking for him for two years." Roland let go of her wrist. "That was your list." "That was my list." She did not soften it. "I would have told you at the door. You would have gone straight to the east landing and died there, and I would have lost him too. So I waited until you could not go without me." Lucien whistled once from the doorway. Boots on the stair below. Roland thought fast. The east door had two guards outside and one in, all expecting a priest. If he walked past it and climbed, the guards would follow and call the hall. If he did not walk past it, the trap would know he knew. He looked at Theodora. "You dance on the third landing. Loud. Pull the two outside guards toward the rail. Lucien knocks on the east door as the acolyte and keeps the inside one talking. I climb past to the fifth. I open your scholar's cell. He tells me which room holds the child, and we leave together, or none of us leave." Theodora nodded once. "He will talk. He has been waiting to talk to someone." She unslung the drum. "After. You get us out with him." "After," Roland said. It was not a promise he liked making with the hour half gone and a fortress shifting posts above him, but it was the price of the truth she had just handed him, and he paid it. He pulled the hood up. The bell overhead struck the quarter. He started for the ladder with the real room in his head for the first time, and the trap behind him instead of in front.

Roland climbed past the third landing while the drum started below. Theodora's steps rang loud on the boards. He heard a guard laugh, then another, and boots moving toward the rail. Lucien's small voice picked up at the east door, polite and slow, buying seconds. Roland took the ladder two rungs at a time and did not look down. The fifth landing was quieter. Two doors on the west side. One was banded oak with a fresh iron plate. The other was a barred cell of heavy stone, the door pitted, the lock old. Roland put his eye to the bars. A thin man sat on the straw with a book on his knee. He looked up without surprise. "She sent me," Roland said. The man's mouth moved once, dry. "Then hurry. The key hangs on the warden's belt at the stair. He sleeps after the hour bell." Roland drew his sword and looked at the lock. The plate was thick. A blade would ring the whole landing before it broke. He sheathed the sword. If he left now for the key, Theodora would hear no cell door open and walk out with the crowd, and the scholar would stay, and she would never forgive that, and neither would he. He went for the stair. The warden was slumped on a stool at the half-landing, chin on chest. A rusted iron key hung from a loop at his hip. Roland cut the loop with his belt knife and caught the key before it struck wood. He was back at the cell in a count of twenty. The key fought the lock, then turned. The door swung. The scholar stood, steady enough. "The child is behind the oak door," he said. "They locked it from outside. The bolt is simple." Roland drew the bolt. Inside, a small boy sat on a folded cloak with a crown crooked on his blonde hair. He had been crying and had stopped. He looked at Roland with careful blue eyes. "You has my bear?" he asked. "No," Roland said. "Not yet. I will look after. Come." The boy stood and took his hand. "I Alaric," he said. "I tired." "I know," Roland said. They went down together, the scholar behind, and met Theodora and Lucien at the drum stand, and walked out through the gate as a priest, an acolyte, an entertainer, a scribe, and a small prince in a borrowed hood. By dusk they stood in the great hall of the king's seat above the branches. The king came down the steps himself and lifted the boy and held him a long time without speaking. Then he pressed a heavy pouch of gold into Roland's hand and told him to name any further reward. Roland shook his head. "He wants his bear," he said. "It is lost somewhere in your hall. Let me find it before I sleep."