She felt the air shudder. Heard a great whumping sound, like a massive ripple of air.

Then a dull thumping came from the lake.

Once. Then again.

She doubted her hearing. Was it some kind of echo? The echo of their passing?

Zezili dismounted. She knotted Dakar’s reins to a tree. She strode down a snaking path to the lake, her coat flapping behind her. She heard ice cracking. The sound rolled across the bowl of the lake.

Outside the cover of the trees, the flat lake caught the moons’ light like a mirror. The lake glowed milky blue. Zezili walked out onto the ice. It creaked beneath her. She peered across the lake and saw a fissure opening at its center. The snow trembled. A chunk of ice broke up from the lake and skittered across its surface.

Zezili moved faster, toward the heart of the lake. “Who’s out here?” she yelled. Her voice echoed, loud and eerie.

Something was coming out of the lake.

Zezili crouched where the cracks in the ice originated, and saw hunks of ice floating on open water. She got down onto her belly and slid forward. She saw a pale, clawed hand striking at the black water.

Then a head emerged, and a torso.

There was a woman in the lake.

Zezili should not have been surprised, not here, on the glowing ice of this twice-cursed lake, not after everything that had happened since she got the Empress’s order to start killing dajians, but she was struck dumb with horror as she watched the woman pull herself from the icy depths of the frozen lake, hand over hand, from freezing water to powdery snow.

The woman gazed up at her, not so much a woman, Zezili realized, as a young girl. She was dark of hair and eye.

Zezili took her under her arms and dragged her forward onto the ice. “Stay flat on your stomach,” Zezili said. “Don’t stand or you’ll drown us both.”

Zezili grabbed the girl’s arm and pulled her away from the broken ice floe. She dragged her clear of the long cracks around the scar. Then she stood and took the girl with her. The ice continued to groan. Zezili’s stomach knotted. The inn was not far, but if she, too, fell in the ice, she’d have to leave the girl behind.

She huffed out a sigh of relief when she stepped onto solid ground again. She picked up the girl, surprised at how light she was. The girl clung to her like a sodden puppy. Zezili glanced over her shoulder at the wound in the ice. A soft wind buffeted her face, drew the clouds back over the moons. The lake fell into darkness.

By the time she reached Dakar, it had begun to snow again.

The girl’s eyes fluttered.

“Where did you come from?” Zezili asked.