Poison could not resist a smile at seeing how perfectly her imagination had matched Fleet’s tales to the land that surrounded her. Of course, he had never pretended to have set foot outside the Realm of Man – Poison would not have believed that for an instant, back in the days before she left Gull – but he professed to know people who had. And then there were his books, that he used to read to Poison until she began to borrow them and read them herself. Between one and the other, Poison had built up a picture in her mind of what this wondrous, fabulous, dangerous realm would look like. And it looked like this. The vista was breathtaking. They stood on a small hill, but that hill sat on top of a bigger hill, so that they were high up above the surrounding countryside. The sky was an odd shade of burnished amber with hues of purple, and the sun seemed closer than Poison had ever remembered it, and unbearably bright to look upon. To the west, a river of purest turquoise wound its way through the grassy folds of the land, glittering in the morning light.
