Glassroot was full of footprints which nobody had made.
They showed in the smooth pale roots crossing the clearing, shallow hollows shaped like heels, narrow toes, the divided ends of hooves. Ysabet knelt to inspect one. The surface was hard and faintly transparent. Far beneath it, water moved through the wood in slow dark threads.
“Wear,” Suth said. “Enough travelers. Enough years.”
Chaska laid her boot in a human-shaped depression and found it too small.
“Children?”
“Some. Or a person with smaller feet than yours. Such people are rumored to exist.”
Chaska withdrew the boot.
The clearing stood at an old junction where three broad root-shelves met like the ribs of a hull. Weathered cedar market stalls stood between the trunks, and a lichen-green canvas awning hung empty at the south entrance. Thick moss covered a stone hearth whose rocks had tilted apart as the floor shifted beneath them. The place smelled of damp shelf mushrooms, old woodsmoke, and boiled cabbage left behind by autumn drovers.
