What was fresh air a minute ago suddenly reeked. I heard thunderous flapping above. I thought I saw a shadow. Was it the beast? Glancing up, I nearly lost my balance. I looked down the mountainside and thought about how the slightest misstep could send me crashing to the rocks below. Suddenly that was not so fearful—it seemed almost a relief. I pictured myself jumping off the mountainside and plummeting down below. Who would know? They’d think it was an accident.

No sooner had the sound and shadow gone than I felt another beast, the one within, stinging me, also coaxing me to jump and punishing me if I refused. I moved closer and closer to the edge, surprised when my leg stopped against some sort of guardrail.

“We have to turn back,” I cried out suddenly, not even recognizing my voice. “We’re going to freeze up here. There must be another way. I’m going back!”

15

“I HAVE TO TURN BACK,” I said to the group crowded around me. “I have to.”

“The flying beast wants you to turn back,” Shad said. “The scorpion wants you to turn back. The web tries to pull you back. But you must go forward—to Charis.”

“I can’t.”

“You can, for the Woodsman says to, and he only commands what he also empowers. You have his book, you have the bird within, and you have us, your family. You must draw on our strength now as in other times we must draw on yours.”

As he said this, I felt two forces fighting within me. I kept trying to remember the words of the GuideBook, repeating them over and over. After a few minutes the scorpion stopped its stinging. I still felt fear but was determined now not to show it. Nick Seagrave was not a coward or a weakling. Now I fought not only fear, but embarrassment at how I’d panicked.

We moved on, the old man close beside me. His breath whistled in his nose. His neck creaked like a rusty hinge. The breeze clinked the icicles in his beard against each other. The sounds annoyed me. Malaiki hummed a gentle song in the frosty air.

Don’t waste your energy.

When I saw her face, the frost on her eyebrows, the fear in her eyes, my heart melted. I took my second sleeping blanket from around my coat and wrapped it around her own two blankets, now stiff as boards. I looked at her and smiled, seeing my daughter, Amy. She reached out her hand. It was permafrost. Immediately I forgot the condition of my own chapped hands and rubbed them briskly against hers. After I’d done this for a minute or so, she bent her fingers.