The words melted away as the girl relaxed against his grip, staring up at him with those eyes of hers. Her nearness hit him like a slap, the press of her hips as she shifted beneath him, the rise of her chest as she struggled for breath. She was steady now, her panic drained away, and yet for the moment he did not release her wrists.

“How are you here?” he asked. The last he’d seen of her she’d been collapsed on the crumbling floor of the orphanage, overcome by smoke. Even awake, she shouldn’t have been able to pass through the gates. That, after all, was the whole point of his years of training. He heard Scial Nin’s words once more in his mind: Men, whole legions, stepped through the kenta and simply vanished. But then, here she was, skin warm as sunlight against his skin, full lips parted slightly as her panting slowed.

“Kaden,” she said finally, releasing a long, shuddering sigh. His name sounded strange on her lips, foreign, like an old dialect spoken only in prayer.

“How did you pass the kenta?” he asked again. Then, even more urgently, “Is Valyn all right?”

She shook her head. “I don’t know. I woke up coughing. It was dark. Someone tried to grab me and I ran . . . I fell . . . here.” She glanced around, awe and fear warring in her expression. “Where are we?”

Kaden shook his head. “Far away from where we were.”

Triste’s eyes widened, but before she could respond, Tan stepped through the gate. Where the girl had stumbled, desperate, panicked, as though flung from the violence of the far side, Tan moved quickly but deliberately. His eyes were cold as water dredged from a winter well, reptilian in their indifference, their distance. The vaniate, Kaden realized, wondering if his own eyes had looked like that.

The monk scanned the island, glancing over the ring of impossible gates as though they were so many withered junipers. He ignored both the wide sky and the encircling sea, but when he turned his attention to Kaden and Triste, something moved in those eyes, like the flicker of a great fish glimpsed through winter’s thickest ice. His pupils dilated a hair and then he swung the naczal spear around in a curt arc, bringing the blade to rest against the fluttering pulse at Triste’s throat.

“What are you doing?” Kaden demanded, shock jarring the words from his throat.

“Get off her,” Tan said quietly. “Move back.”

“What’s wrong?”

“Move back.”