They were, in fact, lost. Emmeline found this terrifying. Ainsley had never been more excited about anything in her life.

“Come on,” Ainsley groaned. “It’s an adventure.”

“It’s suicide is what it is,” Emmeline said, extracting her foot from a particularly goopy swamp of mud.

“And so what if it is? We don’t even know if we can be hurt here. We’re probably sleeping, have you thought of that?”

Emmeline reached across and pinched her sister’s arm, hard.

“Ouch! What is wrong with you?!” Ainsley, always melodramatic, rubbed her arm ferociously, as if she could rub the pain right out.

“Not a dream,” Emmeline said, and in a movement that would confound her sister until her dying day, Emmeline—the girl who refused to watch princess movies because princesses were always saved from dragons and dragons often meant blood—grabbed a sharp rock and slit her palm in a slow, deliberate motion, three perfect drops of blood falling wetly to the ground. “And not safe. We could die, Ainsley.”

Nolan’s voice has dropped to a rough whisper. My eyes have fluttered closed, the story playing out against my eyelids, my heart quickening, every bone in my body wanting to drop to the forest floor of Orman and have a look at the blood that started it all.

Slowly, I open my eyes to steal a glance. He reads on, and if I let my eyes blur out of focus and watch the corner of his lips—the only part of him I can see around the cover of the book—I can believe he is weaving an incantation around us.

Nolan notices my distraction and says, “Do you want me to stop?”

“No, I don’t.”

The words come swirling back to me in a flood more powerful than any vortex. The characters I’ve missed running forth, arms outstretched, as I drift on a lazy river of words and stories and feelings, propelled along by Nolan’s gentle and deep voice. I’m stuck between life and dream. I could be anyone.

The girls were much too preoccupied to see the knights, though if they had taken notice, they would have been hard-pressed to find words to describe them.

Nolan’s voice flickers in and out of my consciousness as I lie sprawled on the floor, the world breaking and re-forming itself around me.