“Do you have a thing to say, Miss Bell?” It was Trevor who finally broke the silence. The Patrolman had grown out his beard; the auburn limb reached halfway down his chest now.

“This is my plan,” I started, and I picked up the peppermint stick to wave it like a wand before biting off the end. “You’re right. Nightflesh is winning.” I crunched the shards of peppermint, ignoring the shuffle of whispers that rose from me blurting out Nightflesh’s real name. My gaze flickered up to Porethius, who faced me fully now. “Something is wrong with Winter. The sky is gray, and the trees are dying.” My nails dug into my palms where phantom ash prickled my fingertips. “My job is to make sure the Truth doesn’t die out, and to make sure the mountains and rocks aren’t forced to sing in our place. So, I’m going to fix it,” I told them. “Me and Kaley, to be more specific.”

“Kaley Bell?” Cane spoke up for the first time. “Kaley Bell is in Winter?”

“She’s on her way to get the first piece of the Triad of Signs,” I told them. “We’re going to put it back together.”

A dead beat of silence thumped down on the room.

“Impossible.” It was Trevor who broke it with his unwelcome negativity. “We gave up searching for the signs seasons ago. All who saw the Triad when it was first formed wouldn’t recognize the pieces now—even Mikal had no insight into where they could be, or what they might look like.”

“They can be found. By me and by my sister,” I corrected. “She has dozens of Winter maps in her head, and a Volume woke up to tell her things about the Triad of Signs while she was supposed to be reading the—”

“Kingsblood, why in all of Winter is Kaley Bell here?!” Cane said again, purple eyes round as coins.

I huffed. “A wreath, a drum, and a star, right?” I asked Trevor. “That’s what Mikal said the Triad was made of?” Trevor looked struck. He didn’t deny it, so I turned to Porethius. “We don’t need you to sign off on our plan. I really only came here as a courtesy. We’ll be doing this whether we have help or not.”

“Carrier,” Porethius raised a delicate hand, her tattoos quivering.

“Don’t ‘Carrier’ me,” I shot back. “You dragged my sister into this, remember? I would have done it. I would have come back here in a heartbeat. But you took her, and then she almost died in that basement! So now she and I are going to fix everything, because it seems like a hundred Rime Folk believers can’t get it together long enough to rescue the sacred truths from going silent, and you’ve left it up to a bunch of measly, unimpressive Trite girls to save your skins for you!” I shouted it, flinging a tray off the table and sending truffles shooting for the wall where they splattered.