Thirty seconds. Forty. He felt each one like a weight being added to something he was carrying. The shadows were stable, but they were also pulling from the same place the canopy cover had pulled from and the same place the cauldron had taken from and that place was getting close to empty.

At fifty seconds he let them go.

The shadow groups dissolved. They didn’t vanish dramatically. They just stopped being solid and started being shadows again. The shapes broke apart, fell back to the ground, and became the regular darkness forests had at night.

Above the canopy, two of the dragons roared.

The sound was different this time. Frustrated, maybe. Or confused. Jake couldn’t tell the dragon’s emotions from sound, but he could tell that the riders had just realized they’d been chasing something that wasn’t real and were now trying to find the real group again in a dark forest where everything looked like shadows.

"How far to the town?" Jake asked. His voice came out more ragged than he wanted.

"Two miles," Ankerita said.

"Maybe less. There’s a main road half a mile ahead. Once we hit it we can move faster."

"Can we make it before they regroup?"

"We’re going to find out."

They hit the road six minutes later.

It appeared suddenly through the trees. Packed dirt. Wide enough for wagons. Running roughly east-west through the valley with the kind of maintenance that said it was a real trade route rather than a local path. The iron-suited men reached it first and held position while the rest of the group came through.

Eskar was breathing like a bellows. His face was red and his legs were shaking but he was still moving. He looked at Jake as they hit the road.

"That shadow thing," he said between breaths. "That was new."

"Everything about today is new," Jake said.

They turned east on the road and ran.

*

The town appeared just before dawn.

It sat in a wide clearing where the valley opened up into something flatter. Stone walls. Guard towers. Gates that were closed but had lights burning in the guard posts. A real town with real defenses and people who lived there and didn’t expect dragon riders to be operating in the area.

The group reached the gates as the eastern sky was starting to turn grey.

Ankerita spoke to the guards. Jake didn’t hear what she said but he heard the tone. Urgent and authoritative and the kind of tone that got gates opened even when gates were supposed to stay closed until proper daylight. Money might have changed hands. It was hard to tell in the pre-dawn dark.

The gates opened.

The group went through, and the gates closed behind them, and Jake felt the specific, enormous relief of a barrier between himself and the thing that had been chasing him. It wasn’t safety. Gates could be opened or broken or flown over. But it was something, and something was more than nothing, and nothing was what he’d had for the last however many hours of running.

Ankerita led them through streets that were still mostly empty. The town was waking up but slowly. A few early merchants. Some workers were heading to wherever their work was. Nobody paid much attention to a group of tired soldiers and two exhausted people in torn clothes moving through the streets with purpose.

They reached a building that was taller than the ones around it. Three stories. Stone and good wood. A sign out front that Jake couldn’t read in the dim light but that had the look of an inn or a hotel.

Ankerita went inside.

She came back out two minutes later and gestured for Jake to follow.

"The others will find quarters in the barracks district," she said. "You’re coming with me."

Jake followed her inside and up two flights of stairs that his legs had strong feelings about climbing. Down a hallway. To a room with a solid door that Ankerita unlocked with a key she’d gotten from somewhere.