“Be careful,” Ayla said quietly. She held up her arm so Crier could see the gooseflesh, the tiny hairs standing on end. “I don’t know what’s wrong. But something is. Go slowly, keep your eyes and ears open.”

“I’ll go in front,” Crier said. “You stay behind me.” She was staring straight ahead, chin raised, jaw tight. Her eyes in the overcast light were a human brown, warm and true, the color at the heart of all living things, the color of fallen leaves and forest floors and floodwater in spring, when the rivers surged up and over their banks, crashing forward, uncontainable, carving new veins into an old world. Tendrils of hair had escaped Crier’s braid, curling at her temples and ears.

“Hey,” Ayla said.

Crier looked at her.

“. . . Never mind,” Ayla mumbled. “C’mon, we’re falling behind.”

The two of them slid down the shelf of rock to the path below, Ayla stumbling and Crier landing with infuriating grace, and hurried to catch up with Dinara and the others. The path was even more treacherous than it looked from above, the ground slanting downward. It reminded Ayla of the tiered garden at the queen’s palace, where she’d been reunited with Storme. Except these tiers were rocky and uneven, and if she took one wrong step she’d find herself tumbling halfway down the mountain slope. The path wended its way around boulders and jutting outcrops of rock, and their party walked it slowly and silently, all their concentration dedicated to not slipping. Dinara was in the lead, Crier and Ayla bringing up the rear. And the farther down into the valley they got, the louder Ayla’s instincts screamed at her: Turn back. Turn back!

Up ahead, there were two tall column-like boulders that stood like massive gray sentinels on each side of the path. All of a sudden Ayla’s mother’s voice filled her head: a half-remembered story about a door to another world. Two stones as tall as towers, standing upright in the middle of a flat, barren ice field, as if a giant had plucked them from the mountains and dropped them there. From far away, the space between the stones didn’t look any different. You could see the ice field through them, an expanse of white snow and white sky. You could walk right up to those stones and nothing would seem out of the ordinary. But if you kept walking . . . if you passed between them . . .

Ayla, a tiny child then, had asked: What? Mama, what would happen?

Nobody would ever see you again.

Dinara, at the head of the party, reached the stones, and Ayla came so close to shouting STOP. But of course Dinara passed between them without issue. Of course she didn’t disappear; of course she wasn’t whisked away to some unknown place. Ayla scowled at herself. She was almost seventeen—far too old to let herself get spooked by an old faerie story. She kept walking, forcing herself not to hesitate as she and Crier reached the two stones. Childishly, she held her breath as she walked between them, like how some people held their breath as they walked past a grave. But of course nothing happened. Ayla let out her breath. Their party had filed into a clearing of sorts, an area where the ground flattened out temporarily like the bottom of a bowl, the mountainside rising up on all sides around them. The air was colder here. Ayla saw that Dinara had paused, consulting the compass once again; the rest of them slowed to a stop, waiting.