Branch nods. "All right. We may want to take one of the paths that intersect with the road past Greenspring then, to get out in front of the caravan. Sharing a road with one of those is not fun. Unless there was something you wanted to buy in the town?"

The scenery is really quite spectacular - not like Yu-Shan, with its jeweled streets and towering palaces, but lovely in a wholly different way. More like Luna's hunting preserve, with its cloud-capped mountains - although those mountains are heavily forested, and for as far as Lotus can see, the upper slopes here are covered only by golden-green grass, the bright spots of wildflowers, and great gray granite boulders and rock formations. The peaks are capped with white, glittering in the bright spring sunlight. Lower down, a fuzz of dull gray-green darkens the mountainside. Lower still, the light catches a silver snake of a stream coiling through the valley bottom, and the faint smudge of smoke in the air.