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Shame poked Thorn in the hot fragile place between her lungs.

“I don’t know,” Thorn told Noro. “I just... I was grumpy.” She fussed with Zaf’s coat—Brier’scoat. “Are you cold? Is the grass too itchy?”

“Areyoucold?” Zaf watched her through a veil of frizzy white hair. “Is that why you’re grumpy?”

Thorn sighed sharply. “I’m not grumpy, really, it’s just...”

But she couldn’t find the end of that sentence. She searched her thoughts and found only scary dark shapes she didn’t understand.

Instead she settled down beside Zaf, her head resting on Noro’s belly too. She squeezed her eyes shut and thought about the witch Quicksilver, and wondered how in all the storms they were going to find her—wherever in this strange starlit world she was. If theyhad, in fact, reached the eastern mountains, could they climb down from them into the Star Lands without falling to their deaths? And then they would have to navigate another country, which none of them had ever before visited, and what if Quicksilver didn’t actually exist?

She worried her thumb along the dip of her left palm, where she had fallen and scraped it not so long ago. She hadn’t been brave enough to look at it yet, but now she opened her fist the tiniest bit.

Her hand looked whole and healthy, pale and slightly pink.

She let out a breath of relief. Whatever had happened in that swamp, she would have to believe it was nothing to worry about.

“Stop fretting,” said Zaf, nudging Thorn’s arm with her elbow. “What does fretting ever do except make you think about things it’ll do you no good to think of?”

Despite everything, the idea of Zaf watching her closely enough to see fretting made Thorn smile, and gave her a small piece of courage.

A thought came into her mind. She breathed carefully around it.

“Zaf?” she asked.

“Hmph,” answered Zaf, already half asleep.

“Can I hold your hand?”

Zaf made a happy sound that reminded Thorn of waking up on a weekend morning, with nothing to do except paint.

Then Zaf’s hand found Thorn’s, and Thorn, holding her breath, her heartbeat skipping, grabbed on.

.22.

The Nesting Giants

Thorn awoke when Noro disappeared from beneath her head.

Her skull thumped against a tree root. A muffled yelp came from somewhere close. Zaf?

Thorn pushed herself up onto her elbows, coming face-to-face with...

No, face-to-eye.

With acreature.

Thorn scrambled back into the roots. Zaf, hugging the tree trunk, grabbed her and pulled her close.

The creature crouched in the grass before them was a bird,Thorn thought—but unlike any birds of the Vale.

This one was even bigger than Noro, with a slick coat of pale pink feathers over stark white skin. It had high, stooped shoulders, and it lumbered closer to Thorn by pulling itself across the ground with its wings’ knobby elbows. Its beak was periwinkle and enormous—scooped and gaping, flanked by flaps of feathered flesh.

The bird tilted its head. Its bright black eye blinked curiously at Thorn.

“You are what?” croaked the bird.

Then the bird’s head swiveled round. “Seen you, stick head.”