Flicker shook his head. “I remember that. When the sun comes up, right? We don’t have it here. I told you, it’s just cold and dark.” He gestured with his spear. “Do you need to rest? Otherwise we should keep moving.”

CHAPTER ELEVEN

THE FROZEN FORTRESS

NO SUN, AND no moon. It was no wonder the fire-sprites never came up to the surface.

The landscape was bleak and unwelcoming. They’d come up out of a crack in the ground at the base of a range of hills stretching off in both directions. Facing the other way, a row of jagged mountain peaks were visible only as blots against the stars, reminding Alice uncomfortably of the bowl of mountains surrounding Esau’s fortress. In between was a dusty plain, scattered with a few rocks and the occasional glint of a frozen-over stream.

Not dust, she realized as they started walking. Ash. The stuff was pale gray and as light as powder, puffing around their feet when they moved and leaving a clear trail of footprints behind them. Here and there, wind tugged it up into tiny ash-devils, gray whirlwinds that danced around them like playful spirits.

Flicker led the way with confidence, sighting down his spear at the distant shapes of the mountains to get his bearings. His long, glowing hair was a beacon, throwing red and yellow light all around them, like a pool of life amid a gray, dead emptiness.

After a while, to break the silence as much as anything else, she said, “Why do you come up here, if there’s nothing to see?”

“It must look stupid to you,” Flicker said. “You can walk through a book into any world you like, and I have to scrape and crawl to get here.” He waved a hand at the bleak landscape. “It wasn’t always like this.”

“You . . . remember?”

Flicker’s lip twisted. “That’s right. My spark made sure of it. I look out at this and I remember a time when the Heartfire was so strong, rivers of molten rock ran across the land, and my people lived under the stars.”

“What happened?”

“Every year, it gets a little weaker, a little cooler. Every year we move down a little farther. Every year there are fewer of us. Eventually, there’ll be nothing left but ash. I used to think there might be something else to find if we looked up instead of down.”

“Does Pyros know about this?” Alice said.

“Of course. Everyone knows. But they’d rather not think about it. Pyros says we can trust the Readers to help us.”

“A Reader could help you,” Alice said cautiously. “If you could use the portal-book, you could find a new home.”