All their fates—Claire’s, Sophie’s, Arden’s—were tangled together, and Claire didn’t know the exact moment in time the knot had formed.

Had the threads first begun to weave together when her older sister, Sophie, asked Claire to follow her up the ladder in Great-Aunt Diana’s fireplace and they clambered into Arden? Or did they have the chance, even then, to avoid becoming snarled in a legend? Maybe the binds tightened when Sophie threw herself between Claire and an arrow, almost fatally injuring herself, or the moment Claire freed the last unicorn from the rock.

Or perhaps their lives would have always been tangled with Arden’s, no matter their choices.

Because they hadn’t been the only Martinsons to discover Arden. The first had been Great-Aunt Diana, who had fallen so in love with it that she had decided to change her name to Nadia and stay in Arden permanently, leading everyone else to presume she was dead.

Which had led to Dad inheriting Windemere Manor and all its contents.

Which had led to a family summer spent cataloging the house’s more interesting collections and the discovery of double doors that opened into a gallery with a fireplace on the far end.

But it was also possible that the threads stretched back even further than Great-Aunt Diana/Nadia. After all, Claire and Sophie and Aunt Nadia weren’t just visitors to Arden—they were protectors of Arden—princesses, specifically, as they were all the descendants of a long-ago prince who had tunneled his way to another world to escape his older sister, the unicorn-hunting queen Estelle d’Astora, nearly three hundred Arden years ago.

Claire shivered. The garnet tunic had been warm enough when she packed it a week ago, but the wind had picked up, bringing with it the taste of cold and a distant rumble of thunder, as well as a brand-new worry: How long would she stay invisible if it started to rain?

She was not invisible in the way grown-ups sometimes used to describe Claire and other kids like her who were good at being quiet and remaining unnoticed, but in the truest sense of the word. Because even though Claire could feel the arrow’s slight weight on her palm, it still appeared to be floating in midair. She was actually invisible—but for how much longer?

At the beginning of her journey, she had needed to tilt her head and squint to see the outline of her body, but now, as she looked, she only needed to half squint to make out her chewed fingernails.

The Invis-Ability dye was definitely wearing off.