Sensing danger, the woman suddenly swiveled around. Her green eyes glittered with amusement. A hand shot out to pluck the speeding weapon from the air. It was over before it had even begun.

Ark slumped back, his last hope clutched tightly in the raven-woman’s hand. There were a few seconds of tense silence. Ark was defeated, but if she was going to give the order to the mass of shifting birds, he would not act the coward. He held her gaze.

“Now that,” she said, “is interesting. A boy who has mastered fear. The use of my gift was also well improvised.”

Ark was confused. He expected death, not praise. Then he figured it out. “It was your voice, when I followed the squirrel, when I grabbed the feather, when I was hiding with Mucum….”

“Yes. Note that the only way out of here is up.” The woman grabbed Ark’s jerkin again and tossed him easily to the top of the nest, where he landed in a heap. He felt like one of Shiv’s play sticks, thrown around for the sheer holly of it. Managing to sit upright, he briefly swayed backward with tiredness, then pulled himself together, aware that if he fell, the drop would be brutal.

The woman scurried up the sheer wall of the nest below him like a spider, and walked off down the branch. She turned back briefly. “Come. If you have mastered your fear, then there is no reason to be afraid.”

Ark saw that the nest was wedged between two forking branches. But these were not carved flat like the woodways of home. As he stepped off the nest, the way ahead turned into a treacherous and ankle-twisting path of pitted bark and slippery lichen. He reluctantly drew closer, staring up at the figure who towered over him. Despite her crookedness, he also saw for the first time her fierce and ageless beauty.

“I have been looking over your shoulder from the beginning. Forgive my little test. I had to see what you were made of. A cruel face is not the only one that I wear.” The woman picked her way down the path, her figure flowing between pools of shade and light. “Walk with me now.”

Ark tried to keep up as the branch climbed up and curled around, his eyes reeling with the strange sights of this new land. A butterfly bigger than a horse fluttered past, its iridescent blue wings an echo of the distant sky. The truth of the woman’s words clicked in his head like a cog. Twilights where he wandered in the woods alone, feeling that he was being watched and dismissing it. “But why?”

“Later. At least let me introduce myself. You may call me —”

“Corwenna! The Raven Queen!” Ark’s eyes went wide with recognition and fear.