“We shouldn’t go back out there if we were you. They say that the cu sith—dire wolves to you—have returned to the forests around Rookskill of late. You can’t see them in the daylight, of course. But they roam closer at night. Hungry. Large. Big teeth. Chomp, chomp.” The whole time the wight spoke they drew closer and closer to Isaac until they were right next to him. The wight grinned (or so Isaac thought), emitting a sickly cold breath of air. They reached a skinny arm toward Isaac’s pack.

Isaac slid around so that he faced the wight head-on. He wasn’t about to give up his pack. “Leave off,” he said in a gruff way.

The wight retreated with a “humph.”

“Don’t let Willow bother you,” came a voice from the other end of the hall. “If you tell them off, they have to obey. So, you instinctively did the right thing. But Willow’s nicer to humans than most wights are. Aren’t you, Willow?” A fair-haired girl wearing a tartan skirt and green cardigan, who looked to be Isaac’s age, crossed the hall toward him.

Willow floated high into the air. “Thank you, Ame,” the wight said in a sniffy voice.

“I think Lark needs you in the dining hall,” the girl said to the wight, who popped away. The girl came up to Isaac and stuck out her hand. “I’m Amelie Bateson. We’ve been expecting you.”

He stuck out his own hand, wiping it first on his pants, as he’d been sweating. “Isaac Wolf.”

“Leo gave us a bit of a heads-up. We don’t get newcomers here,” she said, “at least not in a long while, and no one sent word ahead about you coming, so it’s good that Leo knew. Kat has given the area right around the castle a bit of enchantment, wards, you know, to keep evil out, and they would’ve kept you out, too. The dire wolves aren’t part of her plan, though,” she said with a frown. “They came here on their own. Some other kind of magic that we haven’t figured out yet. But at least they can’t get past the wards.”

Isaac was trying to wrap his head around it all. The wards must explain the invisible wall he’d stepped through. This Leo could predict the future. His parents had sent him here to Rookskill, a place rich with magic, populated by things like wights, he was carrying a magical object, and he could feel magic in his bones. And there were people here like this girl who were unfazed by it all.