“We’ll keep a watch tonight,” Mal said, “and head farther east tomorrow.”

East to the Cera Huo, where phantoms stood guard. But we were already traveling with ghosts of our own.

* * *

THERE WAS NO EVIDENCE of the thieves the next morning, only a field scorched in bizarre patterns.

Mal took us farther into the mountains. Early in our journey, we’d seen the curling smoke of someone’s cookfire or the shape of a hut on a hillside. Now we were alone, our only company the lizards we saw sunning themselves on rocks and, once, a herd of elk grazing in a distant meadow.

If there were signs of the firebird, they were invisible to me, but I recognized the silence in Mal, the deep intent. I’d seen it in Tsibeya when we were hunting the stag and then again on the waters of the Bone Road.

According to Tolya, the Cera Huo was marked differently on every map, and we certainly had no way of knowing if that was where we’d find the firebird. But it had given Mal a direction and now he moved in that steady, reassuring way of his, as if everything in the wild world was already familiar to him, as if he knew all of its secrets. For the others, it became a kind of game, trying to predict which way he would take us.

“What do you see?” Harshaw asked in frustration when Mal turned us away from an easy trail.

Mal shrugged. “It’s more what I don’t see.” He pointed up to where a flock of geese were tacking south in a sharp wedge. “It’s the way the birds move, the way the animals hide in the underbrush.”

Harshaw scratched Oncat behind the ear and whispered loudly, “And people say I’m crazy.”

As the days passed, I felt my patience fraying. We had too much time walking with nothing to do but think, and there was no safe place for my thoughts to wander. The past was full of horrors, and the future left me with that breathless, rising panic.

The power inside me had once seemed so miraculous, but each confrontation with the Darkling drove home the limitations of my abilities. There is no fight to be had. Despite the death I’d seen and the desperation I felt, I was no closer to understanding or wielding merzost. I found myself resenting Mal’s calm, the surety he seemed to carry in his steps.

“Do you think it’s out there?” I asked one afternoon when we’d taken shelter in a dense cluster of pines to wait out a storm.

“Hard to say. Right now, I could just be tracking a big hawk. I’m going on my gut as much as anything, and that always makes me nervous.”

“You don’t seem nervous. You seem completely at ease.” I could hear the irritation in my voice.

Mal glanced at me. “It helps that no one’s threatening to cut you open.”

I said nothing. The thought of the Darkling’s knife was almost comforting—a simple fear, concrete, manageable.