She was a hundred paces down the beach when she heard someone approaching. Two someones. Moving quickly. Crier whipped around—guards already?—but it was only Hook and Bree.

“Giving us the slip, Ayla?” Hook said as the two of them approached. His voice sounded light, but Crier’s stomach still dropped.

“No,” she said. “No, of course not. I was just”—human accent, human accent—“going to check on something, I was gonna be back by dawn. I swear. I wouldn’t leave with no explanation, not after all you’ve—”

“Breathe,” said Bree. “He was joking.”

Oh.

“I heard you sneak out is all,” said Hook, gentler this time. “Something told me you weren’t off for a midnight stroll. Seems I was right. So . . . ?”

“So . . . what?” said Crier.

“So what trouble are we getting into tonight?”

She stared at him. It was pitch-black out, the beach lit only by a waning moon, but her eyes caught more than a human’s did. She could see Hook’s expression, and sometimes it was hard to tell, but it didn’t look like he was making fun of her. Bree looked serious too, regarding Crier steadily.

“I . . . I’m going to the Queen’s Cove,” said Crier. “It’s the only other place that could possibly have clues about Tourmaline. I don’t think much will come of it, but I have to check.”

“The Queen’s Cove,” Hook echoed. “How far away is that?”

“Just over a mile. Near the edge of the Varnian border.”

“And you were planning to go there on foot, in the middle of the night, search the entire cove—in the dark—and be back by dawn?” Bree asked.

Yes, because if Crier was alone, she could have run the distance to the cove in ten minutes. But of course it would take Ayla, the human, at least twice as long, and searching in the dark would take ages.

Best to play dumb. “I didn’t want to take a horse,” Crier said. “Don’t they need sleep?”

“Don’t you?” said Bree.

“The horses’ve had a couple hours, and today was easy on them anyway,” said Hook before Crier could answer. “A few more miles won’t hurt ’em. Come on, then, we’ve wasted enough time chatting. It’s time for an adventure.”

“An adventure,” Bree muttered, wry.

“You don’t have to come along!” said Hook as the three of them headed back toward the camp, where the black shapes of the horses looked like strange rock formations on the beach.

Bree huffed. “You know I do. Someone’s gotta make sure you don’t get yourself killed.”

“Ayla will protect me.”

“Oh,” said Crier, worried. In an instant she summoned everything she’d ever read about combat: hand-to-hand, long range, sword fighting, wrestling, guerilla warfare, flipping through the hundreds of books in her mind, combing the pages for anything useful. She was naturally strong and fast, but she had no practical skills. How was it that she could speak fourteen languages but didn’t know how to wield a dagger? A glaring oversight. “I—I don’t know if I’ll be very good at that. But I can try.”