“Blood Wolves. Sea Wolves. A veritable feast of enemies! Joy to the warriors who race in bold pursuit! As for the other, every temple is a heart, and every heart a temple, so perhaps, Deputy Courier, you speak in deliberate riddles to confuse me.”

“I do not!” she objected too quickly.

Abruptly he raised a hand to ask for silence. He took a step back, chin tilting up, eyes narrowing as he listened.

A spear-thrust of dread lodged in her chest. Elen held her breath as she, too, listened.

A tone as of a dissolving bell spilled outward, growing ever more ragged at its edges until she heard as from an impossible distance a noise that might have been the hiss of rising steam or perhaps the rumble of a storm blowing in from beyond the horizon.

“I hear an echo of the Shivering Tide and the Hollow Wind,” he said hoarsely. “Just as the elders feared. This is ill-omened, indeed. I must investigate what it means.”

“What does it mean?”

He examined the walls as if he hoped to discover the means to break whatever magical leash kept him bound to the promontory. Then he turned his gaze on her, like pools of darkness too deep to fathom.

His voice fell heavy, sonorous, a command expecting compliance. “I call upon the law of passage.”

“I don’t know what the law of passage is.”

“Can it be we sacrificed ourselves with the best of intentions and yet now will fail because no one remembers?” He touched a hand to his eyes as at a pain he could not reach, and though she knew better than to trust a haunt, the gesture made her wish she could help him.

“What is the law of passage?” she asked gently.

He lowered his hand to examine her closely. Was there magic in the shadow of his eyes? The dangerous allure of his presence? “To investigate what this means, I need to go north. Yet I can no longer walk in the world as I am, shorn of the body I once had.”

“And here I am, headed south,” she retorted, for there it was: the haunt’s beguiling and deadly request. She hastily added, “With people expecting me.”

“Then let me borrow the youth who sleeps beside you.”

A pain in her heart flickered. She had been right not to trust any haunt, even so briefly. Yet, ridiculously, it still hurt a trifle.

He went on smoothly, encouragingly. “You need only wake him, so that I might ask. I give my word of honor I will return the young one unharmed when I am done with my investigation, according to the law of passage.”

She snapped in a rage, “I think not! You can’t have him!”