She stopped to rest near the top of the hill, in the middle of a stand of trees with slender white trunks shaded by delicate leaves. Each stand grew a decorous distance from its fellows so that the hilltop glen seemed a gathering of stout Zoaz-priests saluting the dawn. At first she was merely impressed by the number of trees and the profusion of light-shot greenery, so different from the shaded gardens of the Seclusion, but after climbing higher, she reached a place where the trees began to thin and Qinnitan saw the full extent of the woods and the white-capped mountains beyond. She fell to her knees.

It was one thing to see the forests of the Eion coastline from the rail of a ship, their unending dull green spread along the coast like a rumpled blanket, but quite another to be in one and to think about crossing it. Qinnitan was a child of the desert, of streets where, despite the autarch's thousand sweepers, the sand still blew, and of gardens where water was abundant precisely because it was expensive and rare. Here, Nature squandered its blessings without discrimination, as if to say, "The way you and your people live is small and sad. See here, how for my own amusement I shower my riches on mere beasts and savages!"

For a long time she could only kneel, shivering, overwhelmed by the frightful vastness and strangeness of this alien world.

She did not find food that day or the next. She tried chewing on the grass that sprouted between the trees; it was bitter and did not ease the gnawing ache in her stomach, but at least it did not poison her. She heard birds, saw squirrels leaping through the upper branches, and once even saw a deer poised on a rise before her as if hoping to be noticed, but Qinnitan knew nothing of hunting or trapping.