by the shifting light of the lanterns, we moved to the most shadowy corner of the chamber: the place where we had once sat playing games by candlelight and made the most astonishing discovery of our lives.

We dragged out the heavy oak chest from against the wall and set our lanterns on it so their light was cast into the little alcove where the chest had been, an indentation that wasn’t even big enough to store a folded blanket in.

“Come on,” Iulia urged. “My feet are itching for a dance.”

The first time we had done this, in our earliest days at Piscul Dracului—when I was only six, and Stela was not yet born—Tati and I had been amusing the younger ones by making shadow creatures on the wall: rabbits, dogs, bats. At the moment when all our hands had been raised at once to throw a particular image on the stones, we had found our forest’s hidden world. Whether it had been chance or a gift, we had never been sure.

It made no difference that we had done this over and over.

The sense of thrilling strangeness had never gone away. Every Full Moon, our bodies tingled with the magic of it. The lamp shone on the blank wall. One by one, we stretched out our hands, and the lantern light threw the silhouettes onto the stones. One by one, we spoke our names in a breathless whisper:

“Tatiana.”

“Jenica.”

“Iulia.”

“Paula.”

“Stela.”

9

Between the shadows of our outstretched fingers, a five-pointed star appeared. The portal opened. Instead of a shallow alcove, there was a little archway and a flight of stone steps snaking down, down into the depths of the castle. It was dark, shadow-dark. . . . The first time it ever happened, back when there were only four of us, we had clutched one another’s hands tightly and crept down, trembling with excitement and terror.