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“Just a little farther!” Brier called over her shoulder. “I think I dropped it over here!”

She climbed up the steep grassy path, her eyes trained on the clearing ahead of her—the very same clearing from which she and the harvesters had run for their lives, only a few hours earlier.

Brier’s stomach knotted itself so tightly she worried she might never untangle it. The thin mountain air felt sharp in her lungs.

While safe and warm in the hut, her plan had felt like thebest idea in the world. Now she worried if she breathed too hard, the whole thing would shatter.

Behind her, crunching through dry tufts of grass, Gert muttered, “Is this really necessary? Brier will understand if you leave her necklace behind.”

The lies Brier had told clogged her throat.

But if Farver, and Gert, and Eldon, and Noro, and all her other friends could lie to her face every day, then she could do it this once, couldn’t she?

Brier’s side pinched. Her chest was starting to ache again. But she forced words out of her stiff mouth.

“My sister may never make it home again,” she declared. “You’d really force me to leave it behind, when Brier, the hero of the Vale, is out there in the dangerous wild, saving all of us?”

An image came to Brier’s mind—Thorn, frightened and alone, lost in the swamps of Estar, fighting the same shadows as their parents. Feeling the world quake under her feet. Hearing the Gulgot’s not-so-distant roars.

Except Thorn wasn’t entirely alone.

Oh,Noro.

Brier blinked the sting from her eyes.Noro, Noro. How could you have kept such a horrible truth from me?

But she couldn’t think about that now—not the countless bolts of lightning she’d helped guide into Noro’s horn for safekeeping. Not the eldisks being forged in the queen’s storm halls.

She couldn’t think about Thorn, maybe out there in the impassable eastern mountains, capturing stormwitches with Noro’s help and not knowing it.

Part of Brier hoped they had never made it to the mountains, that they were still wandering lost in Estar, maybe turned around for good. At least if they were stuck in the Estar swamps, where the darkness was too thick for storms, they would not be killing any stormwitches.

Brier stamped her feet hard as she walked. She could not think about any of those awful things. She pushed them out of her mind with each step.

At last they reached the clearing—but when Brier searched the surrounding rocks, her heart dropped.

No stormwitches. The clearing was empty. She’d hoped they would still be lingering, waiting to try again—

Ah.There they were: two pale shapes, shifting quickly beyond that far line of boulders.

Behind Brier, Farver Pickery stopped to catch his breath.“Where is it, Thorn, my dear? What does the necklace look like again?”

Then, a third pale flash.

Brier squinted through a narrow crevice between two tall boulders—and locked eyes with Zino.

Her skin prickling with nerves, she started jogging toward the boulders. “Right over here! I think I see it!”

Farver and the others followed her, their footsteps crunching. Brier’s eyes blurred. They were so eager to trust her. And why shouldn’t they? They trusted Brier, and Thorn was Brier’s softer half.

She nearly spun around and stopped them. She nearly told them to run.

But they were liars.

Brier’s chest constricted. Even knowing what she had done, part of her longed to parade down the streets of Aeria on Noro’s back, her hair crackling with static and her bindrock gloves buzzing with all the lightning she’d caught that day.

What a happy girl that Brier had been.

A swift blur of white: Zino, hiding beyond the boulders, disappeared.