Rowan knew roughly where the Order's protective wards lay in the woods that surrounded his garden, though he couldn't see them with his liminal vision because the were activated by spirit, not death or Disorder. The wards followed the hidden lines of energy that crisscrossed reality like a magical grid woven through the fabric of the Orderly plane, and the strongest currents of energy ran along all the main paths linking the Branches to each other and to the Core Compound like a giant spiderweb.
The edge of the web nearest the Branch of Words overlapped part of his woods. Willow had seemed certain that this was the way Alaric was going.
