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He rumbled a laugh. “I went hiking with my father as a kid. We never sat down and built boats together. Besides, you’re talking about ferrying one or two people across at a time. There’s a ton that can go wrong, even with magic helping us.”

“The way candle.” Theo’s eyes swung to Ren. “You have a way candle. We can use Cora’s knife to slice it into equal pieces. Everyone lights their own and we port across.”

Ren nodded. It wasn’t a bad idea, but it was one she’d already thought of and dismissed.

“We don’t have a full visual of the opposite bank.”

The others squinted, but Ren knew she was right. It was just a vague line of blurred landscape. There was no real sense of their intended target. And she was quite certain none of them had ever visited this particular valley before. They’d have no image of the destination to focus their minds on as they went through the waxways.

“If we can’t see where we’re going, we can’t control where we come out. You never know. It might work. But there’s also a chance one of us teleports inside of a tree.”

Theo looked annoyed at having his idea so easily dismissed. He eyed the river. “We could port as far across the water as we can, then swim the rest of the way.”

Ren sighed. She’d thought of that already too.

“It doesn’t account for the standard delay theorem.”

That earned a look from the others. Timmons snorted. “Do tell us more, textbook.”

Ren answered, “When you use the waxways, your body appears before your mind does. No one usually notices the delay, because we don’t see ourselves port. But there’s about a three-second span where your body appears in the location you’ve jumped before you have any conscious ability to command its functionality.”

Avy was staring. “And that means…”

“It means we’d jump into the river and there’d be three seconds where our mindless bodies are being dunked in the water. What if your mouth is open? What if you happen to hit a rock? It’s possible we might drown before our minds and bodies reconnect. Besides, using any portion of the way candle now decreases the distance we can travel when we’re on the right side of the mountain. We should be saving it for desperate measures.”

“More desperate than a massive river that’s cutting us off?” Theo looked properly annoyed now. “All right. What’s your genius plan, then?”

“I’m thinking.”

Thinking required time. Ren paced back and forth as the others set their satchels down on the sun-warmed stones. Timmons kicked off her boots and rubbed at the backs of her heels while Avy tried to skip stones. Cora actually managed to fall asleep somehow. Ren went through theory after theory as the sun began angling over the trees. She was weighing the merits of levitation spells when she caught a particularly harsh ray of glancing light. She shielded her eyes before looking across the river again. It was a gorgeous blue, colored here and there by white rapids. As Ren stared, she saw that the sun’s angle was drawn in a straight line across the water.

Thick and golden and so like…

“A bridge.”

Theo scowled. “There aren’t any bridges out here.”

“Not yet.” Ren walked to the edge of the bank, squinting to see if the glittering road extended all the way across. Her mind ran through the necessary spells. She turned back to Timmons. “I’m going to need you to pull this off.”

Her friend nodded. “I’m all yours.”

“Right,” Ren said. “We need to move quickly. I don’t know how fast the angles will change, and any huge shifts will loosen the grasp of my spell. We’re going to make our own bridge. Out of sunlight.”

She pointed. The others looked out and saw what she’d noticed. The golden light speckling the surface was thick and rich. It extended in a flawless line across the water. Not an actual bridge, Ren knew, but nothing a little magic couldn’t solve.

“I’m going to use a binding spell. From one bank to the other, with the sunlight as the fixture. Once I’ve bound them, the sunlight will be drawn into a single, functional unit. Which means the next spell can alter the entirety of the bridge, rather than individual particles.”

“What spell will you use?” Theo asked.

It was the second time he’d sounded more curious than pompous. She called that progress.

“Well, the reflection we’re seeing is due to the angle. It’s coming in shallow enough that the surface of the water redirects its path. And as you know, redirection is a change in function.”

Theo was nodding. “Ockley’s tertiary principle. Change is a doorway for magic.”

“I can alter the alteration.”

“And make the particles solid.” Theo actually smiled. “That’s clever.”