A bright moon was out. A brighter light banked past her, then went back the way they’d come from. Prim watched Mab descend toward a river of chaos that ran through a gorge a short distance beneath them. The sprite hunted back and forth along it for a minute, then plunged back in.

Not far away Prim could hear the uncouth gagging noises that she had come to associate with Corvus’s changing back into his bird form. There was no better place to be a bird. They were very high up in mountains. Half the sky was clear. The other half was stone. Below them chaos filled the lower reaches of a deep straight-sided canyon. Its opposite bank was a sheer cliff topped with a glacier. Beyond that the land dropped away into dark forest.

Her brain put it all together from maps. The cliff on the opposite, or north, side of the canyon was the Precipice. The plateau atop it was the domain where the Shifting Path threaded among hidden crevasses across territory patrolled by Lightning Bears.

They had simply skipped over, or tunneled through, that whole portion of the journey. They would not need to cross the Chasm; they had just put it behind them. They had reached—they were standing on—the Knot. The Fastness must have been nearby.

Four dark forms hurtled up out of the Chasm and tumbled and skidded through the snow around her. Edda took longer to stop than the others, carving a deep gouge in the snow and finally coming to a stop a bow-shot higher up the slope. She was laughing. Her laughter was music, bells, and birdsong. She got to her feet. Looking a little beyond Edda, higher up the slope, Prim perceived that the snow became patchier and soon petered out altogether, giving way to bare rock. Which stood to reason since it was more and more sheltered by the overhanging brow of stone that blotted out half the sky: a place Prim had heard about but never seen depicted on any map, since it could not be. Instead, bards tried analogies: thick ropes knotted together or folds in heavy blankets, except bigger, and made of mountains.

They climbed. It was slow going and exceptionally hard work. That might have been a blessing in disguise since it was very cold indeed, and only the most strenuous effort was going to keep them warm. For a while it seemed like her wading and staggering in the deep powder was making no difference at all, but finally she got to a place where it improved noticeably with each step, and soon after that she joined several of the others who were huddled together for warmth on bare rocky ground. They were all tending to look in the same direction: back the way they had come and down the slope. So once Prim got up there and made sure of her footing, she turned around and looked at what they were looking at.