The Girl Who Fell Into Shadow
The dream had started, as it always did, with warmth.
Elara stood in a meadow that existed nowhere in the waking world, grass silver-green beneath a sky the color of a bruise healing, and she was reaching for something she could never quite name before it slipped from her fingers like smoke. In the dream, she laughed. In the dream, she was free of the ache that lived behind her ribs, the hollow feeling of belonging to no one and nowhere. And then, as always, the warmth curdled into heat, and the heat became fire, and she woke gasping with her hands outstretched and her heart slamming against her chest like something trying to escape.
She did not realize, at first, that the screaming she heard was not part of the dream at all.
"Get back! Get back from her, gods help us—"
Elara blinked into the darkness of the wagon, her nightclothes damp with sweat, and saw Old Tamsin's face lit strange and flickering, twisted with a fear Elara had never seen directed at her before. Behind the woman, the merchant Corvid Ashgrave clutched his arm to his chest, and past him, where his warding stone had sat on its little iron tripod for as long as Elara had traveled with this caravan, there was…
