Somebody came to help Zoria, she remembered—one of the other gods. Wouldn’t that be fine, to be saved by a god! Except that god hadn’t really saved her, had he…?

“Zosim the Helper, grandson of old Kernios the Earth Master, hears Perin’s daughter’s tripping footfalls and offers to show her the way, but the night’s shadows are long and confusing even for the grandchild of the Lord of Owls, and the dark magic of Everfrost delays them.

“Thus the Moon King’s fate is marked and sealed by the mysteries of his own great house…”

Whatever that meant. Her voice trailed off.

A shadow seemed to jump from behind one tree to another at the top of the rise. Briony stopped, heart beating fast. She squinted but could make out nothing among the paper-white birches except the columns of weak sunlight between the trunks, each one shot through with falling rain so that they looked like pillars of smoky glass and diamonds.

Could it be a wolf? She touched the hilt of the long Yisti knife sheathed in her belt. She knew she might be able to fight one wolf, perhaps even kill it if she was lucky—but they hunted in packs, didn’t they? For a moment she was overwhelmed by a dark vision of herself surrounded by wolves in a wet, lonely forest as darkness came on. She began to cry.

“Most beasts of forest and field are more afraid of you than you are of them,” her father had once told her, and she tried hard to believe it now. “They are right to fear us, of course—we men are more likely to be their death than the other way around.”

“That’s me!” she said aloud, as harshly as she could. “Your death!” Nothing moved, no sound except the rain broke the silence after her words had echoed away. Briony coughed again and shook her head, leaned in toward the slope and started to clamber up again, scratching her hands as she grabbed for roots and vines when the way was steep.

“When morning’s sun rises…”

she sang out, loud enough for the wolves to hear, trying to make her voice steady enough to scare them away,

“…All father Perin rides with the gods of his house behind him, the lightnings in his hands and his eye full of fury. The shining towers of Everfrost loom above the icy earth, burning with a pallid gleam like twilight, like bone, and a moat of killing ice surrounds it.”

The story was making her feel cold again. She realized her hood had fallen back and her hair was getting soaked.

“Before his own door stood the Moonlord in shimmering armor of ivory and electrum, pale hair blowing, with his great sword Silverbeam in his hand.”

Just before she reached the top of the rise she saw the shape once more, a movement of darkness a score of paces ahead. Afraid to see it too closely, fearful that it was some predatory beast moving just ahead of her and that the sight of it would freeze her throat, she raised her scratchy voice even louder.