The train was trying to rock me to sleep, but it wasn’t helping. I lay in the narrow bed, watching out the long window as the boreal forest slowly passed by under the moonlit sky.

Doldastam—the capital of the Kanin kingdom—was located in the Canadian subarctic, nestled along the Hudson Bay. It was so far north, it was only accessible by train or plane, and train was the far cheaper option. It also took a lot longer. It was only my first night “riding the rails,” and I had one more night to go.

It wasn’t so bad, though. I had gotten an upper-berth bed, the upper window gave me a beautiful view of the Canadian wilderness in full summer bloom, and now I had plenty of time to worry about everything.

The last time I’d been this far north had been five and a half years ago, after the Invasion of Doldastam. Finn’s younger sister Ember had fought beside Bryn during the war, and she’d been killed during combat. After the war ended and the new Kanin King, Linus Berling, was crowned, he held a ceremony in remembrance of all the lives lost.

I had gone there with Finn and Mia, and we had stayed with Finn’s parents—who had lived in Doldastam then—for a few days. Most of the time had been spent grieving and helping the Holmeses, but I had snuck in a quick visit with Bryn.

That was the only time I had ever been to Doldastam. The handful of times I had seen Bryn since then had been when she came south to Förening, working as the King’s personal guard.

The village I grew up in, Iskyla, was even farther north and more isolated. The only road out of town went to a neighboring Inuit village, and it went no farther. They did trading with the humans by boat and plane—that’s how my foster father got his art books and travel magazines, and when I was older, that’s where I’d go to buy old paperbacks and movies from their meager store.

I had never been farther south than Iskyla, not since I’d been left as a baby. Not until Bryn rolled up in the middle of winter. My foster family—Oskar and Hilde Tulin—owned a small inn. In the winter, there were hardly any guests, and the few guests we did have were almost always townsfolk that needed a night away from their own home for one reason or another.

In the summer, we got the occasional lost tourist or adventurist hikers—I found no fewer than four different battered copies of Into the Wild forgotten in the rooms after they checked out of the inn—but most of the guests were workers passing through, from the southern cities to the mines and the lakes.