Linny Marsh spread the stolen journal across the picnic blanket and weighed its pages down with a heel of bread. Her painted coat rode up her wrists as she worked. Pale purple hair fell across her cheek. Behind her, the cobblestone wall of her sister's shop threw back the afternoon light, and the moss along its stones smelled damp and green. She had taken the journal from the library three nights ago. It belonged to one of the three painters who had all rendered the same real place with a flat, dead light. Somewhere in these pages was the road there. Forge sat beside her with a plate of cheese he hadn't touched. His sleeves were rolled. A burn scar ran down one forearm. He brushed her hair back and kissed her shoulder. He watched her turn a page and said, "You stole it." "Borrowed." "Fern will know." "Fern already knows." Linny tapped a sketch in the margin. A hill. A stand of trees drawn twice, from two angles. "Look. He went back. He couldn't get the light right, so he went back." Forge set the plate down and scooted back an inch. "Why this place, Linny. Why so hard." "Because something is missing from every painting anyone has ever made of it. All three of them painted the light wrong. Flat. Still. Like they were afraid of it." She looked up. "I want to see what they couldn't." "Don't go." It was almost a plea. "What?" She breathed with disbelief. "It's past the ridge. People don't come back from past the ridge." His voice stayed level, which was worse. "It's a silly dream. It'll get you killed." She closed the journal on her thumb. Betrayal stung her chest. She’d never expected it from him. "A silly dream." "Yes." "You spent two weeks drawing swords instead of finishing Mrs. Hale's bracelet." His jaw set. "You want a forge full of blades no one in this village will ever buy. Don't tell me about silly dreams, Sterling." "That's different." "Because it's yours." He stood. The blanket lifted at one corner and the bread rolled off the journal. "Stay," he said. "Paint here. Paint anything else." It was the same sentence, in a new mouth. She had heard it once already, and she had left that house too. "No." He waited. She did not look up. After a moment his boots crossed the grass and were gone. Linny opened the journal again. Her hands shook once and then stopped. She read every margin. She read the ink smudges. On the fourth page from the back she found what she wanted: a line of small numbers under a sketch of a leaning pine, and beside it, three words in a hurried hand. Past the ridge. North of the frost line. She held her thumb on the words until they printed into her skin. She rolled the journal into her coat pocket, stood. Tomorrow morning, she set out to find the magic. To finish what the other artists couldn’t.

Linny walked home from the picnic with the journal pressed against her ribs. The coat pockets bumped her hips as she went. A crust of bread. A stub of charcoal. Two brushes. That was all they held. Past the ridge was three days out, maybe four. She counted what she had and the number stayed too small. She would freeze before the frost line. She would starve before the leaning pine. She needed rope. She needed a blanket. She needed more than this coat could carry. The cobblestone shop sat under its climbing vines, windows warm. Linny pushed the door open. Her sister Lena looked up from the counter, needle held between her teeth, blue hair pulled back. A bolt of gray wool lay across her lap. She took the needle out. "You're late." "I know." Lena watched her cross the room. The seamstress read faces the way she read cloth. She saw the red at Linny's eyes and the set of her jaw. "What happened." Linny stopped at the stairs. She thought of Forge sitting back on the blanket. Silly dream. She thought of the other house, the other voice, the same sentence. She did not want to hand any of it to her sister. "Nothing." "Linny." "Nothing, Lena." She climbed the stairs before her sister could stand. Her room was small and smelled of linseed oil. She dragged the wooden chest from under the bed. She worked fast so she would not think. A wool blanket, folded tight. A coil of rope from the peg by the window. Two tins of paint. Three brushes wrapped in rag. A tin cup. Hard cheese and a heel of bread stolen from the kitchen shelf. She rolled the blanket around the rest and tied it with twine. Last, she tucked the painter's journal inside her coat, against her chest, where the pages could feel her breathe. She set the bundle by the door and lay down in her clothes. Downstairs, Lena's needle moved in the quiet, tick tick tick, long after the lamps went out. Morning came gray. Linny listened at the top of the stairs. Lena was already at the counter, bent over the gray wool, a shirt laid across her knees. Her hands moved without stopping. She did not look up when the floorboard above her creaked. Linny went into her father’s room. He was pale. He’d made her promise never to give up on her dreams, so we wouldn’t. She gave his head a lasting kiss before she climbed down in her stocking feet with the bundle over her shoulder. She reached the back door. Her hand was on the latch when she stopped and looked once at her sister's blue head bowed over the cloth. "I'll come back," she said, too soft to carry. She stepped into the yard. She pulled her boots on at the wall. The bundle rode her back now, heavy and honest. Past the garden, past the low fence, the path bent toward the ridge road. Linny took it.

The ridge road climbed through gray light. Linny walked with the bundle on her back and the journal against her chest. She had gone maybe a mile past the last fence when she heard the first crack behind her. A twig. Then nothing. She kept walking. A stone shifted somewhere in the brush. She kept walking. She told herself it was a fox. She told herself it was Lena, come to drag her home. She hoped it was Lena. She stopped in the middle of the road and turned. The path was empty. Pines held the wind above her. Snow dusted their tops where the ridge rose ahead, steep gray stone crowned in white. "Come out," Linny said. "I'll go home if it's you." Nothing answered. She waited a long count. Then she turned and walked again, faster now. The steps started again behind her. Light. Short. She thought of the boy who begged for bread outside the square, small and thin. A child could follow a person for miles without being seen. A child she could handle. A child she could send back with a coin. She stepped off the road behind a boulder and crouched. She set the bundle down. She picked up a fist-sized rock and waited. The steps came closer. Slow. Then quiet. Then a shape moved past the boulder at knee height, and it was not a child. It was long and low, gray as the stone, with a narrow back and a flat head that turned the wrong way on its neck. Its eyes found her before its body did. They were pale and wet. It did not blink. It smelled like cold water and iron. Linny did not throw the rock. Her hand would not move. The thing lifted its nose and drew a slow breath through her, taking her in. Then it stepped once toward her, careful, testing the ground. She ran. She ran off the road and up the slope, boots skidding on frost, the bundle beating against her spine. She did not look back. She did not need to. She heard it on the scree behind her, patient, keeping her pace. It was not trying to catch her yet. It was walking her. She crashed into a stand of pines above the road and pressed her back to a trunk. Her breath tore. Below her the shape climbed without hurry, weaving between rocks. She understood then that it had picked her up long before the first twig. It had let her hear it. The woods were still three ridges off. She could not go back down. She could not stay here. She dug in her coat until her fingers closed on the stub of charcoal and the journal. She pulled the journal out and tore a page. She wrote one line for Lena, in case someone found it. Then she pushed off the tree and climbed.

Linny climbed until her legs shook. The creature kept its distance below her, gray against the gray scree, patient as weather. She reached a shelf of rock and stopped because her lungs would not let her go on. The thing stopped too. It sat back on its short legs and watched her with wet, forward eyes. Its ears turned like a cat's. Up close it looked less like a wolf and more like something between a mouse and a house cat, swollen too big. She understood then that it had not lunged. It had walked her up the ridge for an hour and never closed the gap. If it wanted her dead she would be dead. She pulled the journal from her coat. Her hands were shaking. She flipped past the coordinates to the page she had copied from the stolen painter's book — the sketch of the place with the flat, still light. She held it open and turned it toward the animal. "This," she said. Her voice cracked. "Do you know this?" The creature stood. It came three steps up the slope and stopped again. Its nose worked the air above the page. Then it turned its flat head and looked north, off her route, into a stand of frost-bright trees she had planned to skirt wide. It looked back at her. It looked north again. It took another step, deliberate, away from the direction she meant to go. Linny closed the journal. Every rule she had ever been given said run downhill and take her chances on the road. Forge would have said it louder than anyone. He was not here to say it. That was the point of leaving. She picked up her bundle. "Alright," she said. "Show me." The creature moved. It did not hurry. It kept ten paces ahead and looked back at each turn to be sure she followed. Its short legs punched neat holes in the frost. Twice she stopped to breathe and it stopped with her, sitting like a fat gray cat on the stone. The pines thickened. She stepped through a gap in the rocks and into a dense cluster of frostwood trees. Ice sheathed every branch. The canopy above her caught the light and threw it back in small hard pieces. The air smelled of cold sap. She had never seen a wood like this on any map. The creature waited, watching her. Linny set her bundle down and pulled out her charcoal. Her hand was steady now. She had followed a monster off her route and it had brought her somewhere no painter's journal had described. She did not know if she was being led to the place she wanted or away from it. She only knew she was deeper in the woods than she had planned to be by nightfall, and the thing that had herded her here was waiting to see what she would do next.

Linny stood in the frostwood cluster with her charcoal in her hand and watched the gray creature watch her. It had led her off her route and into a wood no map had shown her. It would not stay her guide forever if she could not keep up. The trees pressed close. The ice on the branches threw the light back in a hundred small flashes, and every trunk looked like the last. She took three steps forward to test the ground. When she looked back, the gap she had come through was already gone. The trunks behind her looked the same as the trunks ahead. She turned in a slow circle. Every direction was the same silver flare of ice and bark. The creature waited ten paces off. It swung its flat head to see if she was coming. She could not tell it she was lost. She could tell it she needed a moment. "Wait," she said. It sat. Linny knelt and opened her bundle. Rope. Blanket. Journal. Food she could not spare. She had no ribbon, no chalk, no paint that would show on frost. She had her coat. She put the charcoal between her teeth and worked her knife under a seam on the inside of her hem. The stitches she had sewn last spring gave with a small clean sound. She cut a strip of painted cloth the length of her forearm. Purple and yellow. Her own hand had made those marks. She could see them from twenty paces in this light. She tied the strip around a low branch at eye height. It hung bright against the ice. She cut another. She cut a third. The creature stood up. It did not like the stopping. It took a step north and looked back. "I'm coming," Linny said. "I have to see where I've been." She cut until her hem was ragged and her coat was shorter at the front than the back. She counted twelve strips folded into her pocket. She stood and followed the creature, and every twenty paces she tied one to a branch at the height of her own eyes. The cluster went on longer than she thought a wood could. Twice she stopped, looked back, and found her last marker exactly where it should be, a small bright flag between the trunks. Her chest loosened each time. On the twelfth strip the creature stopped. It sat down in the snow and did not go forward. Ahead the trees thinned. Through the last trunks Linny saw a clearing, and in the clearing the light did not move. “This is not the place,” she huffed. The creature laid down. Linny walked into the clearing with a frown. She’d walked all day. It was growing dark and she was nowhere near finding her magical landscape.

Linny stood in the flat, wrong light of the clearing and felt the air change. The wind dropped first. Then it came back cold enough to sting her teeth. Ice began to tick against the branches behind her. She turned and saw a wall of gray sliding through the frostwood trunks. A squall. She had maybe two minutes. Her paints were in her coat. Her hands were bare. If the paints froze they would crack the tubes. If her fingers froze she could not untie a knot or hold a brush again for days. She needed walls and a roof, and she had neither. She ran back to the tree line. The gray creature was already up, ears forward, watching the squall come. It turned and trotted along the edge of the clearing, low to the ground on its short legs, its long back swaying. It stopped at the base of a leaning frostwood and looked at her. "Show me," Linny said. The creature squeezed under the trunk and vanished. She dropped to her knees and looked. The tree had fallen against another and left a dry gap beneath, floored with old needles. Not big. Big enough. The first hard gust hit her back. She shoved her bundle in ahead of her and crawled after it. Snow chased her in. She kicked it out with her boot and pulled her blanket across the opening, wedging the edge under the trunk with her knife handle. Inside it was dark and close and smelled of sap. The creature was already curled at the far end, watching her with its wet, forward eyes. Its body took up half the hollow. Its fur gave off a low, steady heat. Linny worked fast. She dug her paint tubes out and pushed them under her shirt against her stomach. She flexed her fingers until they hurt. She wrapped her hands in the ragged hem of her coat, the same painted cloth she had cut her markers from. Outside, the squall closed over the clearing. Ice hit the blanket like sand. She pressed her back to the creature's side. It did not move away. Its ribs rose and fell against her spine. She held her hands under her arms and counted her breaths until they slowed. When the wind eased she lifted a corner of the blanket. The clearing was gone. Her twelve markers were gone. Snow lay a hand deep on everything, unbroken and blue in the dusk. The way back was buried. Linny let the blanket fall. Her paints were warm against her skin. Her fingers worked. She was alive, and she was lost. The creature huffed once and settled its flat head on its paws. "Tomorrow," she told it. "You take me the rest of the way." It closed its eyes. Linny did not.

Linny woke to a weight on her chest and no light at all. The blanket she had wedged across the opening was gone—no, it was still there, but pushed inward by a wall of packed snow. She reached out and her knuckles hit cold. The snow had come in the night and sealed the hollow shut. She held still and listened. The creature breathed beside her, slow and warm. Her own breath came faster. The air in the hollow tasted thick. She had felt this once before, under a heavy quilt as a child, and she remembered how quickly a small space could turn against a body. She pushed the blanket. It gave a finger's width and stopped. She pushed harder. Snow crumbled onto her wrist and she stopped, afraid the roof of it would drop on her face. "Up," she said to the creature. "We dig up, not out." It lifted its flat head. Its wet eyes caught the last shred of light leaking through the packed white. She pointed at the trunk above them, where a knot of bark met the fallen frostwood. The creature stared. Linny took her knife from where it wedged the blanket. She reached up along the slope of the trunk and pressed the blade into the snow at an angle, aiming for the side of the drift, not the top. She scraped. Snow fell into her lap. She scraped again. Cold water ran down her sleeve. Her arm shook by the twentieth pass. The air was thinner now. She felt it in her lips. The creature watched, then rose on its short legs and set its front paws against the trunk beside her hand. It began to dig. Its paws moved in short, heavy strokes, faster than hers. Snow piled between them and she scooped it back toward her boots and stamped it flat. A thread of pale light broke through above the knife. Linny put her mouth to the gap and drew a long, clean breath. Her chest ached with it. She widened the hole with the knife handle, then with her fist. The creature squeezed past her and shoved its head through. Its shoulders followed. She grabbed its haunches and pushed. When it was out, she threw her bundle up after it and climbed. Her coat caught on a splinter of the trunk and tore. She did not stop to look. She stood knee-deep in fresh snow, blinking at a white world. The clearing was gone under it. The frostwoods were black posts. The sky was the pale of an eggshell. Her paints were still warm against her stomach. Her hands hurt. The creature shook itself and started off, low-backed, breaking trail with its chest. Linny counted three breaths to steady herself. Then she stepped into the track it made and followed.

Linny followed the gray creature into a thicker stand of frostwoods. The trunks pressed close here. Ice coated the fine upper branches and made a low shimmer above them. Snow muffled every sound but her own breath. Then the creature stopped. Its ears pushed forward. Linny stopped too. She heard it a moment later—a slow, heavy tread between the trees ahead. Something big. Something that did not care about being quiet. Her hand went to her knife and closed on nothing. She had left it wedged in the snow at the hollow's mouth. She had climbed out and forgotten it. Her stomach dropped. She crouched behind the nearest trunk. The creature crouched with her, low against her boot. She had heard the village talk about what lived past the ridge. She had laughed then. She was not laughing now. Her hands shook inside her sleeves. The trees ahead parted. A white cat the size of a plow horse stepped into the gap. Small blue wings folded tight against its shoulders. Its eyes were a hard, pale blue. It lifted its head and drew in the air. Linny pressed flat to the bark. She had no blade. She had a knife-cut coat, paint tubes warm against her belly, and a small gray animal breathing at her ankle. Nothing that would stop the thing in front of her. The panther took a step. Then another. It moved without hurry, the way the first creature had moved on the ridge road, and she understood it was choosing when. Beside her, the gray creature shifted. Its whole body went tight. Then it broke. It shot out from behind the trunk in a low gray streak, tail flat, and cut across the panther's line of sight. The panther's head snapped around. Its haunches dropped. It sprang. Wings opened once, twice. The panther cleared a low branch and was gone between the trunks, chasing the smaller shape deeper into the cluster. Snow sifted down from the disturbed limbs. Linny did not think. She ran the other way. She ran until her lungs burned and the trees thinned. She did not look back for the creature that had stayed with her since the ridge. She could not help it now. It had bought her this. She stumbled out of the frostwoods onto a lip of open ground and stopped hard. Below her the land dropped off, a raging River of ice chunks and broken trees flowed hundreds of feet down. Lights sparkled just above the trees on the other side. She was so close. She just needed a way across.