Sloth with nap banners on a leg

Vellenmoor had no proper map, only a tangle of rope bridges and a king who had been dead for two hundred years, but it had a custom, and the custom was the Lantern Procession. Every autumn the townsfolk strung their lamps from the bridges and carried them through the market to the old wall, and every autumn someone had to lead the line and sing the verse. The council had decided, after a long argument over soup, that the honour belonged to the sloth who lived above the well. Nobody had asked him. Nobody ever did.

The procession set out at dusk without him. Pim the stoat carried the first lantern, a heavy brass thing that swung on a chain, and the crowd sang the verse in the wrong key because nobody could remember the words. Halfway down the road the rope under the lamp-makers' bridge gave way with a crack like a dropped plank, and two hundred lights tumbled into the mud. Somebody shouted that the sloth should have caught them. Somebody else said he had never been asked. In the silence that followed, the whole town looked up at the dark fig.

Oswin was still asleep when they reached him, a bedraggled crowd with lanterns hooked on their elbows and mud to the knee. Pim climbed first, then the baker's daughter, then the old heron, swearing softly the whole way up. They hung a single lamp from the branch above his head. It flickered, and he opened one eye, considered the light for a long and unhurried moment, then closed it again. The town had been searching for him for years, and tonight, at last, it had found him exactly where he had always been.