The landing should have broken something.

  That was the thought that arrived first, before the cold, before the doubled shadows, before any of it. Riven had fallen from a height with nothing below them but dark soil and root and stone, and they had hit the ground hard — hard enough to feel it in their teeth, hard enough that the breath left them in a single involuntary sound — and then they were on their hands and knees and everything still worked.

  They stayed there a moment, taking inventory. Two hands. Two knees. Ribs that ached but held. The mark on their left palm was warm in a way it hadn't been before, a deep specific warmth like something banked inside it had just spent itself, and Riven understood without being able to explain the understanding that the mark had done something. Had given something. Had cushioned the fall in a way that had nothing to do with physics and everything to do with whatever Edren had put inside them in that alley three hours ago.

  The thought of Edren sat in their chest like a stone.

  They looked up.

  The forest was enormous. The trees were wrong — too tall, too still, their bark a deep reddish-black that seemed to hold warmth inside it the way old brick does after a summer day. The canopy was so dense that the only light fell through gaps overhead in narrow columns, and each gap showed two moons, each casting its own shadow, so that everything on the forest floor had two of them — one sharp, one soft, never quite aligned.

  The tear behind them had sealed. There was only forest.

  Riven stood. Their legs held.

  "You shouldn't be here."

  They had been watching the whole time.

  The person who stepped out of the shadow between two massive trees looked approximately Riven's age and moved with the kind of unhurried economy that belongs to people who have never needed to hurry. They were dressed for this place — dark, practical, nothing that would catch or slow. Their eyes went immediately to Riven's left hand. Not to Riven's face. Not to the sealed tear in the air behind them. To the mark.

  Something moved through their expression. Recognition. And underneath the recognition, dread — the specific dread of someone who knows exactly what a thing means and wishes they didn't.

  Then it was gone, and what remained was direct and serious and entirely without comfort.

  "They'll cross within the hour," they said. "We need to move."

  They ran.

  The forest at night was a different problem than the forest in theory. The roots came without warning, the ground dropped and rose in the dark, and the doubled shadows made depth impossible to read. Riven ran by sound as much as sight — the rhythm of the person ahead of them, the placement of their feet, the half-second warning of a breath before a turn.

  The ravine came out of nowhere.

  It was perhaps thirty feet across and deep enough that the bottom wasn't visible — just dark, and the sound of water somewhere below that, and a log crossing it that had been placed there deliberately by someone who knew this route. Riven didn't slow down. There wasn't time to slow down. They hit the log at speed and crossed it in four steps with the void on either side of their feet and didn't look down and made it to the other side and kept running.

  "The people following you are called Hunters," the person ahead said. Not slowing, not turning. The words came out between footfalls, precise and without preamble. "They were Spellweavers once. They gave that up."

  "Gave it up for what," Riven said.

  "For this. For the ability to track a vessel across worlds. To cross without a Crossing Point." A pause for a low branch. "They don't take vessels alive if they can avoid it. The mark transfers at death. It's easier."

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  Riven processed this.

  "The mark transfers," they said. "To whoever is closest."

  "Yes."

  "So killing me just — passes it on. To some random person."

  "Yes."

  "That's—" Riven didn't finish the sentence. There wasn't a word that covered it that wasn't obscene.

  They ran. The forest ran with them, indifferent. Above, through the gaps in the canopy, the two moons watched with their misaligned light and cast their doubled shadows on everything, and Riven thought about Edren in the alley and the exhaustion in his eyes and understood, for the first time, that the exhaustion might have been guilt.

  He hadn't known. He'd said as much. But he'd also known what the mark was, what it did, what it made Riven into.

  Riven went quiet. There was nothing to say that would help, and the silence at least left room for thinking, and thinking was the only tool they had left.

  The hollow was beneath the roots of a tree so old it had stopped being a single tree and become something closer to a landscape — roots the size of cars, bark grown over itself in layers that suggested centuries of patience. There was a space beneath the largest root just wide enough for two people if neither of them breathed too much, and the person — Lyren, they had said their name once, quickly, while crossing the ravine — pulled Riven into it without ceremony and put a finger to their lips.

  Then they went still.

  Riven went still.

  The forest went still.

  And then the thing came.

  It was not a Hunter. Riven understood this immediately without being able to say how. The Hunters had been wrong in a human way — wrong eyes, wrong stillness, wrong patience. This was wrong in a different register entirely. It moved through the canopy above them and the sound it made was somewhere between breathing and static, like a signal trying to resolve into something recognizable and failing, and the hairs on Riven's arms stood up in a way that had nothing to do with cold.

  Beside them, Lyren's lips were moving. Silently, quickly — words Riven couldn't read, in a language Riven didn't have, their eyes open and fixed on something that wasn't the root above their heads. Whatever they were saying, they were saying it with the focus of someone doing two things at once.

  The thing stopped.

  Directly above them. The breathing-static filled the hollow and pressed against Riven's ears and Riven stopped breathing entirely because breathing seemed like too much, like too loud, like the kind of thing that gets you found, and beside them Lyren's lips kept moving and their eyes stayed fixed and neither of them moved at all.

  Then it went.

  Not quickly. Not with any indication that it had decided they weren't there. Just — went. In a direction. Toward something else. And the sound faded until the forest filled back in around the silence it left behind.

  Riven started breathing again.

  Lyren stopped moving their lips. Closed their eyes for one second. Opened them.

  Neither of them spoke.

  It happened without warning.

  One moment Riven was crouched in the hollow with their back against ancient bark and their heart still working its way back down from their throat. The next moment the mark on their palm burned — not the warmth of before, not the directed heat of the landing, but something violent and total, a fire that went from zero to everything in no time at all — and the world split open.

  The forest was still there. The hollow was still there. Lyren was still there beside them, close enough that Riven could feel the warmth of them in the cold air.

  And underneath all of it, threaded through every root and stone and leaf and shadow, running in lines that crossed and recrossed and connected everything to everything else in a living breathing pattern that had no edges and no end — the Weave.

  It was the most beautiful thing Riven had ever seen. It lasted approximately three seconds before it became too much.

  Because Lyren was in it. Lyren was part of the pattern the way everything was part of the pattern, the Weave running through them as it ran through the roots and the soil, and Riven's new and unwanted and overwhelming perception followed it the way you follow a thread, and found—

  Nothing.

  Not damage. Not a wound. A hole. A place at the centre of Lyren where the Weave ran up to an edge and stopped, cleanly, the way water stops at glass. Something had been there. The pattern remembered the shape of it. And whatever it was, it was gone — not lost, not broken, but removed, with a precision that suggested intention.

  Someone had taken something out of Lyren.

  Riven's mark went from fire to nothing in an instant and the Weave disappeared and the forest was just a forest again and their left palm was wet.

  They looked down. Blood, dark in the moonlight, welling from the mark.

  First time.

  They looked up. Lyren was already looking at them. Had seen the blood. Had seen — from Riven's face, from whatever expression had crossed it in the last three seconds — exactly what had just happened.

  A moment passed between them in which either of them could have spoken.

  Lyren said nothing. Turned. Started walking.

  Riven pressed their palm against their hoodie, felt the sting of it, and followed. Because there was nothing else to do. Because the forest was still out there and the thing with the breathing-static sound was still somewhere in it and Lyren knew this place and Riven didn't.

  And because the hole at the centre of Lyren's pattern was going to need an explanation eventually.

  Riven intended to get one.