26
The Lute
Jesse didn’t know the true length of the Westerlands. It was the longest Reach, north to south, and the most verdant and lush. The Easterlands liked to boast about their own green land, Jesse’s father said, with castles in the trees and flowers the size of your hand, but it was the Westerlands that looked as if it had been carved by the careful hands of the Guardians, at the dawn of time itself. The freshness of the Easterlands reminded Hamish Strong of an overly tended garden, but when you were in the Western Reach, you knew you were where it had all begun.
Easlan and Kaslan James had given them a fistful of waypoints that might help indicate their progress north and offer some directional certainty. But after the events at the tavern in Parth, they’d ducked even farther fr
