“Just follow my lead,” he said, tugging me forward. I took a hesitant step, but spray from the ocean had already coated the magic, and my boots slid on the slick surface. The ship rocked on a wave, and the invisible plank bobbed up and down wildly. I ripped my hand from Marc’s grip and dropped to my stomach, grasping about until my fingers closed over the edges of the magic. Then I pressed my face against it, trying and failing not to think about what it would feel like to plunge into the icy waters below.

“Want me to carry you?” Victoria asked.

“No.” Taking a few measured breaths, I added, “I’m fine.”

The plank took that opportunity to buck like an untrained horse, and I slid to one side, spray soaking into my clothing. Lingering in this position wasn’t doing me any favors.

I crawled forward, keeping a tight grip on the edges and the faint shadows of Marc’s boots directly in front of my nose. I made it perhaps the equivalent of ten paces before magic looped around my waist and flung me over Victoria’s shoulder.

Holding onto the end of her braid with one hand, I clenched my teeth and held my breath as the three of them moved at reckless speed over the open water, inhaling only when I felt Victoria’s boots sink into the deep sand of the beach. She sat me on my feet, but I immediately sank to my haunches, waiting for the world to quit spinning. Acutely aware that the three of them were watching, I asked, “Did you signal the captain?”

“He’s been trying to sail away since we stepped off the ship,” Marc replied. “His signal is that I let him.” The debris covering the beach crunched beneath his boots. “We need to get out of the open. There are only a few hours left until dawn.”

We found the first destroyed village by smell more than anything else. Wood smoke, wet ash, and, worst of all, burned meat.

“He’s not there,” Marc said, catching my arm as I veered off the Ocean Road and up the less trafficked one leading to Nomeny. I knew it was so, because there was a sign at the crossroads, the top of it singed black.

“I need to know,” was all I said, my boots crunching as I strode across the ice – snow that had been melted, then frozen again in a sheet as far as the eye could see. At first the trees were only scorched, but as we drew closer to the village, they became blackened, burned, then nothing more than ash on the ground. And scattered amongst them were bodies, heat and fire having rendered them unrecognizable, but every one of them face down. They’d been fleeing. Running for their lives.