Fear melted away beneath defiance. Letting go of the sun-pendant, Rosa hooked a hand around Kasamor’s neck. Heedless of the blood, the regret and her myriad fears, she kissed him. She held him there as long as she dared, a moment of warmth that was all too brief, then stepped away.

“I’m not going anywhere.”

Rosa turned her back on Kasamor. Sword levelled, she faced the mist-wreathed kernclaw.

“I’m a Knight of Essamere; a daughter of Orova. I do not flee, and I will not stand aside.”

The kernclaw’s hood came up. Teeth gleamed in shadow. Metal talons glinted.

“So be it.”

Melanna crouched beside the old yew and clung tight to her bow. Her heart hammered loud enough to rattle her ribs. She glanced hither and yon, desperately seeking movement among the trees, and just as vividly hoping she wouldn’t find any.

Don’t stray into the mists. It was one of the few pieces of her grandfather’s advice that Melanna recalled. He’d delivered it to her in earnest tones in the very heart of the Golden Court. She’d answered with all the gravity a five-year-old could muster and wondered why he’d been so insistent. Only when she was much older did she learn that the mists were a gateway to the Raven’s Otherworld.

But it was one thing not to stray into the mists. It was quite another when the mists strayed onto you. One moment, the valley road had been swathed in a clear, balmy night. The next, it lay beneath a greenish-white shroud, the doorway to the land of spirits crooked open. A land into which her grandfather had now surely taken his Last Ride.

A thunder of wings passed by to the north. Or to what had been the north before the mists had risen. Even direction was suspect now, with flickering echoes of trees long felled crowding beneath the boughs. Past and present blurred beneath the mists.

Screams. A woman’s. Then a man’s.

Melanna clapped her hands to her ears. She pressed against the yew’s trunk, careless of scratches earned from its stiff, spiky leaves. It wasn’t her business. Nothing in the mist-wreathed land was her business. If she stayed small, stayed quiet, the horrors of the night would pass her by.

Except . . . Wasn’t that what men expected of her? Even her father, despite his protestations. That she wasn’t brave enough, or strong enough, to do more than tend hearth and raise children? Never mind that her father’s boldest Immortals would have blanched at the thought of entering the mists. Never mind that there were things in the mist that steel could not vanquish. Or doors that opened onto realms where no sane soul would ever willingly tread.