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She decided to check the major oak. The central tree room was locked with a ward, but both she and Jonathan knew how to enter. He wasn’t there either.

As she pulled the bark door closed, Grace fought the urge to scream. He had to be here. She needed him to be here.

What was she going to do?

Grace wandered over to the impact site and leaned against the wooden cage surrounding it. The site was a well-sized crater formed hundreds of years ago by one of the falling pieces of the Zerudorn Star that had brought mystic resources to Leiloa. Thisportion of the star had consisted of a gold that liquified upon impact, then re-solidified rapidly—or so it had seemed.

Over a few weeks, the gold had slowly warped and spread, covering the entirety of the pit and stretching beyond the rim. If the Protectress hadn’t surrounded the infected area with ice that froze the gold upon touch, the invasive metal may have spread across the entire continent. Fidara, surely, would have been consumed.

Though the ice halted spreading, the pit was still an ever-changing reminder of the danger it posed. What had once been rich brown soil was now a twisted display of golden globules strangled by long tendrils of rootlike gold, twisted and entwined in organized chaos that abutted the knee-high wall of enchanted ice.

Right now, before fall, a handful of thin, vaguely leaf-like sheets of gold extended from the odd gold root, flapping in the wind. Once autumn peppered the pit with fallen foliage, the sheets of gold would dominate the topography. And in the winter, large patches of gold became crystalline in structure when snow fell upon the warped surface of the crater.

And then there was the lone oak that stood well within the ice wall, allowing gold to snake along trunk and limbs, first constricting, then embedding in the bark. The progress had been slow, but hundreds of years had rendered the large tree half-gilded.

Grace noticed a new branch, healthy brown with the beginnings of sprouting leaves. It hung close to the wooden cage, and definitely beyond the ice barrier. She pushed off the cage and retrieved a hatchet and belt from one of the tree rooms. With the tool secured to her waist, Grace began scaling the wooden cage, moving toward the offending branch. Once close enough, she grabbed it. Holding it tight with one hand, shebrought the hatchet down in one hard motion on the branch. It snapped.

She stilled, watching. The highest vein of gold halfway up the trunk rippled, but it solidified after only a small tilt of the tree toward the pit.

Grace tossed the branch, secured the hatchet, and returned to the ground.

Early attempts to cut down the tree to prevent the gold from using its wide-reaching branches to escape the ice barrier had revealed that reverberations liquified the gold, causing the trunk to sag in places the gold had infected. Deeming the project too dangerous, the Protectors had instead built a climbable cage around the site to contain the tree and allow easy trimming of branches.

So it had stayed for hundreds of years. But not long after Grace’s birth, her parents’ generation of Protectors had decided the gold had consumed too much of the tree and tried, once again, to down the oak. Precautions were taken, but they couldn’t predict accurately where the tree would fall, so thoroughly was it corrupted by the gold.

As the axe hit an uncorrupted portion of the trunk, the gold had quivered. Another hit, and it liquified, streaming from the wood into the pit. The pocked trunk creaked and began to lean toward the cage. It was large enough to break through the boards.

Grace’s uncle Liam had been climbing the cage when he saw the impending disaster. Grace remembered the hitch in her mother’s voice as she’d recounted with pride and sorrow the way he’d leapt, no hesitation, onto the tree, using his momentum to pull the trunk the other way.

The gold-eaten trunk snapped, and Liam had plunged into the pit. In the space of a blink, he sank beneath burbling gold. What remained of the tree’s trunk settled at an angle, arching over thepit, and in years to come, new branches began growing from the severed trunk.

The loss, so soon after the failure of the Rogue, had sent ripples through the Protectors.

Grace turned away from the impact site.

She had been far too young to remember her uncle, and the potency of the warnings to keep distance from the beautifully unique crater had dimmed by the time Grace was thirteen and planning a rebellion, but returned with a vengeance the day Jonathan left.

Her first thought upon finding her friend and his family missing had been that they’d moved into the forest fortress. She had sprinted through the trees, passed through the wards, and climbed and leapt between tree rooms, calling for them.

In fact, Grace realized now, today’s search had been a muted replication of that terrible day.

Perhaps that was why she’d drifted to the impact site. Because two years ago, when her harried investigation yielded no response, a terrible fear had gripped her, and she’d jerked her eyes toward the crater. It was the only place in the heart of the fortress that the Ferrers might be.

Logic had returned quickly. A whole family wouldn’t have accidentally wandered through the cage, over the ice wall, and into the deadly golden crater.

And yet, the roiling sickness that had settled in her stomach when she’d believed for a moment that her friend had fallen prey to Zerudorn gold had granted her understanding she hadn’t realized she’d lacked. She’d felt, rather than believed, the pain her mother had described at the loss of Uncle Liam. And Grace never wanted to feel that again.

As she’d walked back to the Ferrer’s manor, she couldn’t help but wonder about what would happen if the gold were set loose on Fidara. Imagining her parents slipping into the depths ofgolden puddles as they tried to stop an uncontrollable disaster haunted her.

It hadn’t taken long for the remnants of her planned rebellion to wilt. Maybe resignation had come as soon as two hours later, when she abandoned her short defense of the Ferrer’s home against the mayor and the sheriff.If standing guard at a door earned whispered threats of injury,Grace had thought,what would reviving the Rogue cause?

The faint hint of a robin’s whistle drifted through the forest fortress, pulling Grace back to the present. She looked at the sky. The patches she saw through branches were brightening. She didn’t have long before her father would expect her in the fields.

She hadn’t found Jonathan.

Was this it? Her solo investigation done?

Her parents were right. She was overreacting. About the rogue, about Garrick Clairmont, about everything. Grace ran her hands over her face, wilting in dejection. She’d better head home now so she didn’t have to explain to her father why she was sneaking out of Sherwood Forest.