The Glassmere spread before them like a held breath, silver-blue and so still that the sky appeared to have fallen into the earth.
Mist curled low along the water's edge, threading between the black stones of the shore. Somewhere in the trees behind them, a thrush sang three notes and went silent. Maren Ashwood stood at the waterline with her boots half-buried in wet sand, one hand lifted to shade her eyes, the other pressed flat against the tarnished locket beneath her collar.
"Don't," Caelan Vyr said quietly, behind her.
"I haven't done anything."
"You're going to. I can see it. You're thinking about touching it."
She dropped her hand from the locket. Her fingers were cold. The mist had crept into her sleeves while she hadn't been watching, and the fine hairs along her forearms stood up. "I wasn't."
"You were." He stepped forward, his boots sinking into the dark grit. His cloak was the deep green of a forest at dusk, the color that marked Imperial couriers on the roads, and he had not taken it off since the ridgeline. "Maren. Promise me you won't touch the water until I say."
"I know the rules, princeling." She said it without heat. It was almost fond, the way she said it. He flinched anyway, the way he always did, and she felt the small, guilty satisfaction of it settle behind her teeth. "I've crossed once before."
"Once. Under Bryn's hand on the rope."
"And lived."
"You saw your own wedding day that crossing. I read the report." His voice was smooth, the Imperial Court diction polished even here, even now, when the wind off the water carried the faint copper smell of something old and drowned. "You saw yourself in a white gown, walking toward a man with no face. You laughed for an hour afterward and wouldn't tell anyone why."
Maren did not look at him. The surface of the Glassmere was darker than the sky above it, the way deep water sometimes was, and she thought she could see, just at the edge of her sight, a shape moving beneath. "It wasn't an hour."
"It was."
"It felt like ten minutes."
"That's what the lake does." He came to stand beside her, shoulder to shoulder, not quite touching. "It gives you back what you cannot bear and makes it feel small. That is the danger. Not the visions themselves."
She knew. Bryn had told her, the first time, in that clipped gravelly voice of his, Eastern Marches flat and dry as old rope. Don't look down, he'd said, gripping the back of her neck hard enough to bruise. Whatever you see, don't look down. The lake reads your wanting. If you look, it opens. If you open, it keeps. Maren had been seventeen then. She had looked. She had opened. The white gown had bloomed behind her eyes like frost on a window, and the faceless man had offered her his hand, and she had taken it, and somewhere in the space between one heartbeat and the next she had understood, with a clarity that lived in her body still, that she would never wear white.
She had not told Bryn what she saw. She had laughed until her ribs ached and then she had stopped, and she had never worn white again, and no one had asked.
"The crossing stones are there." Caelan pointed to a line of dark shapes barely breaking the surface, a quarter mile across. "If we follow them, we stay above the deep."
"And if we step off?"
"The lake remembers. It pulls you into the seeing. You stand on the surface and watch your own death a thousand times, and each time the death is different, and you cannot move until the lake is done with you." He said it without drama, the way one might describe a particularly tedious dinner. "Three couriers went that way last winter. One came out. He did not speak for a month. When he did, he spoke only in someone else's voice."
Maren shivered. The mist was thicker now, pooling around their ankles, and she could no longer feel her toes inside her boots. "Who was he? The one who came out."
"A man named Aldric. Not the Emperor. A clerk in the tax office." Caelan's mouth twitched. "He speaks in his mother's voice now. Very inconvenient for him."
She did not laugh. She had not laughed easily since Asha, and she was not going to start now, not here, not with the lake waiting. Instead she took a breath and held it and stepped off the shore onto the first stone.
The stone was slick. Her boot slid and caught. Beneath her, through an inch of clear water, the stone's surface was not stone at all but something darker, something that moved when she didn't look directly at it. She stepped to the second. Then the third. Caelan followed, his cloak lifting behind him in a breath of wind that came from nowhere, and the mist closed around them like a door.
"The lake doesn't reflect the present," he said, low, as though the water might overhear. "It reflects what could be. Branching futures. The choices not yet made."
"I know what it does."
"Then you know why we have to be careful. The futures it shows are not lies, Maren. They are not temptations the way the old stories say. They are real possibilities. Some of them have already happened, somewhere. The lake simply... lets you see."
She did not answer. The fourth stone was further than the others, and the water between was black and still and thick as glass. She could see her own reflection in it, upside down, and for one breath she thought the reflection looked back a half-second too late.
She jumped.
Her boots hit the stone and she stumbled. Caelan's hand closed around her elbow, steadying, and she felt the warmth of his palm through the wet wool of her sleeve. His grip was precise. Court-bred hands, she thought, the kind that had never hauled a rope or gutted a fish. The hands of a man who had learned to hold things gently because he had never had to hold them hard.
"Thank you," she said.
"Don't look down."
"I wasn't."
"You were starting to."
She pulled her arm free. The fifth stone. The sixth. The mist was so thick now that the shore behind them had vanished entirely, swallowed into a pale nothing, and the stones ahead dissolved into the same pale nothing three paces on. They were walking through cloud. The only solid thing in the world was the line of black rock beneath their feet and the sound of each other's breathing.
Seventh stone. Eighth. The water here was different. Darker. It did not reflect the mist or the sky or their passing shapes. It reflected nothing at all, and that was worse, somehow, than seeing.
"Caelan."
"Yes."
"Have you crossed before?"
"No." A pause. "I've read about it."
"That's not the same."
"No." Another pause. "It's not."
She watched his face in the corner of her eye. He was pale, paler than he had been on the shore, and his jaw was set in a way that meant he was afraid and would rather die than show it. Imperial breeding. She had known boys like him at court, before the court had become a place of gallows and lists of names. They learned young to make their fear look like dignity.
"You don't have to come with me," she said.
"Yes, I do."
"Bryn could have sent someone else."
"Bryn sent me because I'm the only one who knows where the Sunken Reliquary lies. And because I am, as you keep reminding me, expendable." He said it lightly. He did not mean it lightly. She heard the small fracture in the word and looked away.
"You're not expendable."
"I'm the third son of the Emperor who executed your sister. I am precisely as expendable as it is possible for a man to be."
She stopped on the ninth stone. He stopped behind her. The mist moved between them, slow and patient, and somewhere far away a thrush sang again, three notes, and fell silent.
"Asha," Maren said, after a while. "Her name was Asha."
"I know."
"Say it again."
He was quiet for a moment. Then: "Asha."
Something in her chest unknotted, just a little. She stepped forward.
The tenth stone was the center of the lake. She knew this without knowing how she knew it, the way one knows the center of a room by the way the walls sit. The water around the stone was perfectly, impossibly still, and the mist above it thinned until she could see, dimly, the sky through it, and the sky was the color of a bruise.
"Don't move," Caelan said.
She had not been going to. She stood with her feet together on the dark rock and her hands at her sides and she did not look down. She looked at the sky. She looked at the mist. She looked at the pale shape of Caelan Vyr, princeling, informant, third son of the man who had signed her sister's death warrant, standing on the stone beside her with his green cloak dripping and his face the color of old parchment.
She did not look down.
The lake looked up.
It began as a pressure behind her eyes, a warmth, a kind of pulling, as though something far below had caught the thread of her attention and was winding it slowly, hand over hand, into the deep. She held her breath. The warmth grew. The pulling grew. Somewhere in the mist a shape began to move, slowly, as though climbing toward her from a great depth, and she knew, with the ancient knowledge the lake seemed to press into the bones of anyone who stood here, that if she looked down she would see.
She did not look down.
The shape grew closer.
She did not look down.
It was Sera. Not Asha, not the wedding gown, not the faceless man from the crossing when she was seventeen. Sera. Older than Maren had ever seen her.
It was Sera. Older than Maren had ever seen her.
Not the sister she remembered, gangly and sharp-elbowed, forever adjusting the strap of a satchel too heavy for her shoulders. Not the sister who had braided wildflowers into Maren's hair the summer before she vanished, laughing when Maren squirmed. This Sera was a woman grown, her hair cut short at the jaw, a thin scar tracing the line of her left cheekbone. Her eyes were the same dark grey as Maren's own. They looked up through the mist and through the water and through the years, and they were calm.
Maren's breath left her in a small, wounded sound.
"Don't," Caelan said. His voice was very quiet, very close, his hand somewhere near her elbow without touching. "Whatever she is showing you, don't answer."
The shape of Sera opened her mouth. No sound crossed the water. But Maren read the word on her lips anyway, the way one reads a prayer in a language half-remembered: run.
Then the shape of Sera flickered, and a second face layered over it, and this one was Asha.
Not as Maren had last seen her in the public square, not the hempen noose, not the brutalized body the Empire had displayed to make an example of mirror-magic. This Asha was younger, scarcely more than a girl, standing in the doorway of the cottage at Ashwood Crossing with a lantern in her hand and her mouth half-open as though she had been about to say something kind. The lantern light caught the copper in her hair. She was smiling.
Maren felt the heat behind her eyes flare and she made herself, with the whole stubborn weight of herself, look away. She looked at the bruise-colored sky. She looked at the mist. She looked at the wet dark rock beneath her boots, which she was not going to think about, which she was not going to name, which she was absolutely not going to look at.
"He calls her the keeper of the crossing," Maren said. Her voice came out steadier than she had expected. "The thing in the water. The old stories say she was a woman once. They say she drowned here. They say she drowned here on purpose."
Caelan did not answer for a long moment. When he did, his tone had the careful, colorless quality of a man choosing each word as though it might be his last. "There are worse things in the lake than drowned women, Ashwood. The villages on the eastern shore stopped sending their fishing boats out two generations ago. They were right to."
"You've heard the stories."
"My father collected them." A pause, small and bitter. "He collects a great many things."
From somewhere to their left, muffled by the mist, a voice rose and fell in a rolling shout. Bryn Vale's voice, unmistakably, calling their names. The sound cut through the strange, pulled-tight air around the standing stone the way an axe cuts through spun sugar, and Maren felt the pressure behind her eyes ease by a single, sharp degree. She exhaled.
"He'll wade in after us," she said. "He'll do it, too. Don't think he won't."
"He would not be the first Vale to drown in Glassmere trying to be noble." Caelan offered her his hand, palm up, not insistent. "When I say now, step toward me. Keep your eyes on the stone in front of you. There is a second stone, half a pace ahead. Then a third. Then the shore. Six steps, Ashwood. Six steps, and we are out of it."
She did not take his hand. She stepped forward anyway, because she had been counting since they had first set foot on the path of stones, because she had been a rebel operative long enough to know when a man was offering her something she could not afford to accept. Her boot found the second stone. It was slick with something that was not quite water. She did not look down to see what it was.
The mist closed around them as they moved, thicker than it had been, and colder, and it smelled faintly of iron and faintly of new-turned earth and faintly, beneath both, of something sweeter and worse that Maren refused to name. Three steps. Four. The pressure behind her eyes pulsed once, twice, and then the footing under her boots changed. Gravel. Soft earth. The reed-stink of the eastern shore.
She stumbled, and Caelan's hand closed on her elbow at last, briefly, then let go.
Behind them the lake sighed. That was the only word for it, the long slow exhalation of a vast held breath, and then the mist began to thin. Maren turned her face toward the sound of Bryn's boots pounding across the gravel bar and she breathed, and she breathed, and she breathed.
"There you are." Bryn Vale came out of the haze at a half-jog, his beard beaded with mist, the crossbow slung across his back riding up against his shoulder. He looked them over with the rapid, practiced eye of a man who had spent twenty years deciding in a single glance whether someone was worth saving or worth leaving. "Both of you. Good. I was about to come in after."
"You would have drowned," Caelan said.
"Probably," Bryn agreed, with the cheerful grimness of a man stating the weather. "The old woman in Thornbury said you would take the crossing at dusk. She said you would take it, and I said nothing would induce her Highness's third son to set foot on a lake at dusk, and she said the lady in the green cloak would lead him anyway, and here we are, and here you both are, alive. So. Thank you for not making me a liar, either of you."
"The old woman in Thornbury," Maren repeated, slowly.
"Mmhmm. Told me you'd come out the other side. Told me to count to a hundred before I called. I'm at ninety-three, as it happens. Would have started wading at a hundred, tradition be damned." He squinted past them at the standing stones, dim shapes now in the retreating mist. "What did you see?"
Maren opened her mouth. Closed it. The copper taste in her mouth was very strong.
"Something that wanted to be seen," Caelan said, before she could decide what to say.
Bryn grunted. He was the sort of man who understood the shape of an answer without needing its particulars, and he was already turning, scanning the far tree line with the kind of attention that had kept him alive through three wars and a quiet retirement he had refused to enjoy. The eastern shore of the Glassmere was a low place, all reeds and gravel and skeletal alders, and beyond the alders the land climbed in a long green swell toward the ridgeline where, against a sky the color of a fading bruise, the village of Wyrm's Hollow stood in its accustomed evening quiet.
Maren looked up at it.
Then she looked again.
"Captain Vale," she said, and there was something in her voice that had not been there before, a thin bright wire of a sound. "Bryn. Look at the village."
He looked.
The first thing she noticed was the silence. Wyrm's Hollow was a village of dogs and chickens and the particular thin complaints of goats, and it was not silent, it had never in its long history been silent at this hour, and yet tonight it was, the way a stage falls silent before the curtain rises on the worst act of the play. The second thing she noticed was the color. The ridgeline had gone wrong. The green of the long slope had darkened in a single ragged patch, as though a great inkstain had been spilled across it, and the patch was spreading.
It spread the way a stain spreads through wet cloth, slow at first, then quicker, then with a kind of terrible, purposeful fluidity. Where it touched the first of the outlying cottages the thatched roof did not catch fire. It did not crumble. It sank inward, as though the building had exhaled all its air at once, and then the walls followed, and then the shape of the building was gone and the darkness stood in its place, taller than the building had been, shifting at its edges like the surface of water seen through moving glass.
"That," Bryn said, very evenly, "is not a fire."
"No," Maren said.
"That is not an army."
"No."
From across the half-mile of air and alder grove between them and the ridgeline, a sound reached them at last, thin and high and shredded by distance, the sound a village makes when a village begins to understand that it is going to die. It was not a scream. It was the collective intake of breath before the scream, the moment the air leaves a hundred lungs at once, the moment the hands rise to a hundred mouths. Then, on its heels, the scream itself.
At the edge of the spreading darkness, shapes were running. Small from this distance, doll-sized, frantic, scattering from the path of the stain as it ate the fields and the fences and the lane. Some of the shapes reached the lower cottages. Some of the shapes did not. Where the darkness touched them they did not fall, they did not cry out. They simply stopped moving, the way a candle flame stops moving when a hand is cupped over it, and then they were part of the stain, and the stain was larger than it had been.
"Caius Thorne has a column two days south of here," Caelan said. His voice was very precise. Very pale. "He cannot reach this in time. No one can reach this in time."
"What is it," Bryn said. It was not a question. It was a demand for a name, because a man who has spent his life in the field knows that a thing with a name is a thing that can be fought, and a thing without a name is a thing that can only be fled.
Neither Maren nor Caelan answered.
The stain reached the square of Wyrm's Hollow. The little stone chapel at its center stood for a moment against the tide, whitewashed walls and modest spire, the kind of building that had stood for three hundred years and looked as though it might stand for three hundred more. The darkness rose against it like water against a cliff. For a long breath the chapel held. Then the spire leaned, slowly, and the roof caved inward with a sound that did not carry but that Maren heard anyway, inside the bones of her jaw, inside the roots of her teeth.
The scream from the village had stopped.
The silence that replaced it was worse.
Maren reached, without looking, for the locket at her throat. The metal was cold against her palm. Inside it, she knew without opening it, the painted face of her missing sister looked back at her with dark grey eyes, and behind her, layered and faint, the shadow of another face, and behind that, deeper still, the bruise-colored surface of a lake that had shown her exactly what it wanted her to see.
The night came down on the Glassmere like a held breath.
Maren felt it before she saw it, a thickening of the air around the camp, a quality to the darkness that had nothing to do with the absence of moon. They had made their fire small, per Bryn's standing order, and the circle of its light barely reached the first rank of pines. Beyond that ring the trees stood in absolute stillness, and the stillness itself was a kind of wrongness, because wind in the Glassmere never stopped, not even in the deepest hours of the false dawn.
"Rest," Bryn said, crouching at the fire's edge, his knife moving through a strip of dried venison with the precise, unhurried rhythm of a man who had eaten ten thousand meals in the field and could eat ten thousand more. "I'll take first watch."
"Your snoring takes first watch," Caelan said from the far side of the fire. His voice was very even, very dry. "The whole valley knows when Bryn Vale is on watch."
"Then the whole valley knows to keep its distance, princeling." Bryn did not look up. "Sleep."
Maren did not sleep. She sat with her back against a boulder, the locket open in her palm, and she watched the darkness between the trees and tried not to think about Wyrm's Hollow, about the whitewashed chapel folding inward like a paper lantern in rain. Sera's painted face looked up at her from the inner surface. Dark grey eyes. A mouth that had been smiling in the portrait, frozen there in oils and lacquer, a smile that Maren could no longer remember on the living face.
Behind Sera's portrait, as always, the second face. Fainter. The same bones, the same grey eyes, but older by four years and colder by a lifetime. Asha, in the last portrait ever made of her, the one the locket had taken from the executioner's scaffold without anyone asking it to.
Maren closed the locket. The metal was warm now from her palm.
Something moved in the trees.
Not wind. Not animal. The quality of the movement was wrong, the way a word is wrong when it is spoken with the right sounds but the wrong mouth. Maren's fingers found the locket's edge and tightened. She did not rise. She did not call out. She watched.
Then she saw the first one.
It came between two pines at the far edge of the firelight, and at first she thought it was a man, a scout, one of Caius Thorne's outriders moving ahead of the column. The shape was right. Two legs, two arms, a head upon a neck. But the proportions were subtly wrong, the way a reflection in dark water is subtly wrong, and where its face should have been there was only a shallow concavity, a smooth bowl of shadow that turned toward the fire as though it were listening.
Bryn saw it a half-breath after she did. He rose from the fire in one motion, the knife reversed in his grip, and the sound he made was not a word but a low continuous note, the scout's call, the one that meant contact and nothing else.
Caelan was on his feet before the note ended, his sword clearing the scabbard with a whisper of oiled steel.
Three more came from the trees. Then two more. Then three. They did not run. They walked with the slow deliberation of things that had never been hurried by anything they had ever met.
"Seven," Bryn said. "No. Eight."
"Stay behind me," Caelan said, not looking at her, his voice very controlled, very court. "Behind me, and do not move."
Maren did not stay behind him. She moved to his left, where the firelight met the shadow, and she looked.
The shadow-sight came without her willing it, the way a sneeze comes, the way a scream comes. It had been three years since she had let it in, since the night she had watched Asha die in a square in Vyrholdt and had seen, in the moment of the blade's fall, every shadow in the city lift its head and turn toward her as though she had spoken a name. Three years since she had sworn she would never open that door again.
It opened now.
The world thinned. The fire became a smear of orange. The trees became upright lines of darker dark. The night became a kind of water she was swimming through. And the eight shapes between the pines became, for one terrible clear moment, what they truly were.
They were not men. They were not beasts. They were absences with weight, hollows cut in the fabric of the night and stuffed with something that was not flesh
stuffed with something that was not flesh.
She saw them. She saw the threads.
Each hollow had a thread, thin as spider silk, trailing back into the darker dark between the pines. Eight threads, eight trails, leading somewhere she could not see but could feel, the way you feel a hand about to touch your shoulder before it lands. The threads were not black. They were the color of a bruise three days old, the color of a vein at the wrist, the color of something that had been alive once and had been emptied out and hung up to dry.
She knew what they were.
She had seen their like only once before, in the square at Vyrholdt, in the moment the blade began to fall. The executioner had worn the Emperor's colors. The crowd had watched. And at the edges of her sight, in the moment Asha's head left her shoulders, Maren had seen the shadows lift and turn and look at her with something that might have been recognition.
These were not shadows. These were the spaces where shadows had been eaten. These were the gaps left behind when the Emperor's sorcerers pulled the darkness out of a man and used it.
"Maren." Bryn's voice came from very far away. "Maren, what do you see."
She did not answer. She could not. The shadow-sight had her now, the way a current has a swimmer, and she was going under, and she knew it, and she let it take her because there were eight of them and three of them and two of them had swords and one of them had a scout's horn and none of them had any chance at all unless she opened her mouth and spoke the shape she had sworn never to speak again.
The shape was not a word. It was the shape of a mirror held up to a thing that did not wish to see itself.
She spoke it.
The fire went out.
Not dimmed. Not smothered. Out. As though the flame had never been. The clearing plunged into a darkness so complete that for a moment Maren could hear the blood in her own ears and the small sounds of Caelan's breath and Bryn's hand on his belt and the slower sound of her own heart, which had decided, without consulting her, to begin beating very fast.
Then the mirrors came.
She had not made them. They had made themselves, the way ice makes itself on a window when the temperature drops. They hung in the air around her, dozens of them, hundreds of them, each one the size of her palm and each one made of nothing, each one a small window into the same clearing, the same trees, the same eight hollow shapes that had been walking toward them and were now, suddenly, still.
The hollows did not like the mirrors.
Maren saw it happen. She saw, through the shadow-sight, the threads inside each hollow begin to twist and recoil, as though they had touched something hot. The hollows flinched. The hollows made a sound, or rather, they made the absence of a sound, a negative noise that pressed against her ears like a thumb pressed against a drum.
Then they ran.
They did not walk. They did not retreat. They ran, in eight different directions, into the trees, into the dark, away from the mirrors, away from her, and the threads behind them snapped one by one like harp strings cut with shears and the darkness they had carried with them bled out onto the pine needles and pooled there and then, slowly, began to fade.
Maren let the mirrors go.
They did not fall. They dissolved, each one winking out like a candle flame in a wind that blew from no direction, and when the last of them was gone the darkness of the clearing returned to being merely the darkness of a night in the wood, the kind a fire would answer.
The fire did not return. Maren had spent it.
She stood where she had stood. Her hands were at her sides. Her hands were shaking. She could feel them shaking as though they belonged to someone else.
"Maren." Caelan, this time. His voice was careful. His voice was the voice of a man who had been raised in a palace and had learned, among other things, how to speak to dangerous things. "Maren, can you hear me."
"I can hear you." Her own voice sounded strange to her. Thin. Older. "I can hear you, Caelan."
"The fire is out," Bryn said. "We need to move. Now. Whatever they were, they will be back, and they will bring more."
"They will not bring more tonight." Maren did not know how she knew this. She knew it the way she knew the shape of the word she had spoken, the way she knew the threads were gone. "They have been cut. They will have to grow new ones."
"That is not reassuring," Bryn said.
"No," Maren said. "It is not."
She took a step forward and her knees folded under her and Caelan caught her before she hit the ground, one arm under her shoulders, his sword still in his other hand, and she felt the fine linen of his shirt against her cheek and smelled the cedar-and-ink smell of him, the smell of the palace, the smell of the world she had been fighting for three years.
"I have you," he said.
"You should not." She meant it. She meant it more than she had meant anything in a long time. "Caelan, you should not have me. I am not what you think I am."
"I know what you are." His voice did not change. "I have known since the night in the square. I was there, Maren. I saw what you saw."
She lifted her head. In the dark she could not see his face. She could feel his breath.
"You saw," she said.
"I saw." He shifted her weight against him. "We need to move. Bryn is right. Whatever you did, they will tell someone. We have until dawn, perhaps less."
"Perhaps less," she said.
He helped her to stand. Bryn was already moving, gathering what he could from the dead fire, the scout's horn, the small steel mirror Maren had carried in her belt for three years without using. The mirror was warm to the touch now. The mirror had not been warm before.
Maren took it from him. She held it in her palm. In the dark, without firelight, she could not see her own reflection. She could feel it there, though. She could feel the shape of her own face waiting on the other side of the glass, patient as a thing that knows it will be looked at eventually.
She closed her hand around it.
"Let us go," she said.
They went. Bryn first, then Maren, then Caelan, single file through the pines, moving away from the clearing, away from the place where the eight hollows had stood, toward the river, toward the crossing, toward the next part of the road and whatever waited on the other side of it. The wood was quiet. The wood was the kind of quiet that listens.
Maren walked with her hand closed around the mirror and the mirror warm against her palm and the shape still in her mouth like a stone she had swallowed and could not get down.
She had opened the door again.
She had sworn she would not.
She had done it anyway, and three people were alive because of it, and somewhere in the palace the Emperor would feel, if he had any sense at all, that something had been used tonight that he had believed was safely buried.
He would be angry.
He would be afraid.
Maren walked on through the dark. She did not let herself think about what she had become. She would think about it later, in the morning, when there was light enough to see by. For now, there was only the walking, and the warmth of the glass, and the sound of Caelan's breath behind her, and the slow and steady knowledge, growing in her chest like a second heartbeat, that the war she had been fighting for three years had just become a different war, and she was no longer certain she would survive it.
But she would not walk away from it either.
That had never been her way.
The river found them an hour before dawn, a long low sound through the trees, the sound of water moving over stone, and Bryn raised his hand and they stopped at the edge of a bank that sloped down through willow to a ford that glimmered faintly in the last of the starlight.
The Glassmere Crossing.
They had made it.
Maren looked at the water. The water looked back. In its moving surface she saw, for a moment, a face that was not hers, and then the face was gone, and the water was only water, and the dawn was coming, and the crossing waited.
She stepped down the bank toward it.