I’d been to the Well only once, in conditions of light and weather so different I didn’t trust my memory to recognize the cleft in the wall. So I crouched down, recalled the passage, the grotto, and the pool, and allowed magic to flow through my fingers into the stone beneath my feet. Cold, harsh, its cracks filled with frost crystals, the stone gave up its secrets far more reluctantly than earth. But I stretched my mind forward, swept the path and the cliff, and after a moment, a guiding thread claimed my senses—a surety something like that birds must feel when the days grow short and they streak southward beyond the mountains toward warmer climes. Such was the gift of the Cartamandua bent, the legacy of my father and grandfather’s bloodline—a gift I had spurned because of its cost to my freedom. “This way,” I said, moving northward along the shelf path.

“You said Prince Osriel himself comes to Gillarine tonight?” said Gram to the prior, as they trudged behind me, leading the beasts and sharing a flask Gram had brought.

“Aye,” said the prior. “’Twas only out of respect for good King Eodward’s memory that I could stomach hosting such a visitation. How could a noble king breed such a son?”

Gram downed a long pull from his flask. “Abbot Luviar himself could not explain the ways of the gods sufficient to that question.”

Dikes of dense black stone seamed the pale layers of the limestone cliff with vertical bands. Some twenty paces along the cliff, a wide crack split one of these dark bands. “Here,” I said. “We’ll find him here.”

The gray morning dimmed to twilight in the narrow passage. We stepped carefully. A dark glaze of ice sheathed the straight walls and slicked the stone beneath our feet. Ahead of us, beyond a rectangle of gray light, lay the little corrie, centered by a pool worn into the stone.

Clyste’s Well, the pool was called, named for the Dané who had last claimed guardianship there.