The branch-sound pulls Wren's head around before she decides to turn it. Her gauntleted hand finds the sword hilt — not drawing, just resting there, the way she has seen real knights do when they want to look dangerous without committing to anything. The Thornwood shows her nothing useful. Just dark between the trunks, and mist, and then — for one unsteady heartbeat — something tall. Something that stands the way a person stands only if a person had decided, quite deliberately, to be the wrong shape. Pale where a face should be. Still in a way that isn't restful. Then it isn't there anymore, if it ever was. The brook woman hasn't moved. She watches Wren watch the trees, clay jar balanced on one knee, expression unreadable. "You see it too?" Wren says, before she means to. "I see it too," says the brook woman, and says nothing else.