I only realised I’d been picking at a stray hair on my jawline when I finally snagged it and the pinprick jolt brought me back to the walk. I’d reached the treeline already, out of that damned city, past the Institute, the next landmark that idyllic little hut with the pasture of perfect foxgloves for a garden. I carried on. Hungry but determined, seething, boiling inside, needing escape. Up and up. The greens and browns thickening around me, rays of light hopping from branch to bush to boulder. The world crunched under my boots. It felt good.

  Further than I’d ever been. Across the trunk spanning the river, past the husk of the gripweed that almost killed me. Still the gravel path persisted. Who laid it? The hunters and trappers of my town were always bombastically proud to leave no trace of their steps. Us foragers the same, more modestly so. Treat the land as you wish for it to treat you – that’s what we were taught. I rounded a battered old oak so thick you could carve a room into it. And then there were steps. Moss-draped stone steps, all sagging in the centre. An avenue of narrow, gold-leafed aspens leading all the way up.

  Emerging at the top felt like passing through a firmament. An open glade, sky wide and clear above, an elegant mist lingering over a spanning network of low, crumbled stone walls. Once upon a time, something had been here – that was abundantly clear. A something that was now… less. A something that was now barely a small maze of weathered masonry, something that could have once been a sanctuary or temple or cloisters like in the stories I’d read. I stepped up onto a wall for a better view, then stepped right back down again. It didn’t feel right. Felt like standing on a gravestone.

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  In all it seemed to map out a set of chambers gathered around a square courtyard, in the centre of which was a gently babbling pool of water, in the centre of which was a grassy islet overflowing with a bold tapestry of shrubs, flowers, mushrooms, foliage, none of which were remotely the same, and in the centre of which was an ancient yew tree that sprouted from the ground like the hand of a giant beginning a resurrection. Had I noticed that before? To some bird passing overhead, the whole thing must look like some gargantuan eye sitting atop this hill. To me, it looked like a place I could finally stop and eat. I hopped across meandering stepping stones that marked where the pool flowed outwards, out to the edge of the glade, and on the central isle I found a toadstool that looked so comfortable I couldn’t resist sitting and finally opening Robin’s basket.

  The world left me alone. For a halfhundred, maybe more, I sat and ate, and sipped from cupped hands at the water’s edge. Nothing else mattered. Or it did matter, but it just no longer scratched and clawed at me, begging in rasping cries for my time and mind and efforts. Me and the world, we left each other alone for a while. Birds whistled and water bubbled and the breeze ambled idly along. The forest smelt like it always had, since long before any creatures considered giving two-legged walking a go. A lone tri-horn deer wandered through like I wasn’t even there, drank from the water just as I had done, lifted its nose to the air, and went on its way.

  I spotted some feathers on the outstretched leaves of a palm fern and took them with me as I headed back over the stepping stones, feeling as light as the finest mist.