The air is cool and crisp and star-bright.
Zachary opens his eyes again and looks at the figure of Mirabel in front of him. Frozen and waiting, her gown weighed down by old tales and former lifetimes.
He can almost hear her voice.
Tell me a story, she says.
It is what she has been waiting for.
Zachary obliges her.
DORIAN WAKES IN an unfamiliar room. He can still feel the snow against his skin and the sword in his hand but no snow could survive here in this warmth and his fingers are clutched around the blankets piled on the bed and nothing more.
Outside the inn the wind howls, confused by this turn of events.
(The wind does not like to be confused. Confusion ruins its sense of direction and direction is everything to the wind.)
Dorian pulls on his boots and his coat and abandons the comfort of his room. As he fastens the star-shaped buttons the carved bone against his fingertips feels no more or less real than the sword had felt in his hand moments before, or the memory of Zachary’s chilled skin against his.
The lanterns in the main hall have been dimmed but the fire still burns in the expansive stone fireplace. Candles increase the spread of the light over the tables and chairs.
“Did the wind wake you?” the innkeeper asks, rising from one of the chairs by the fire, an open book in his hand. “I can get you something to help you sleep if you’d like.”
“No, thank you,” Dorian says, staring at this man who has been plucked from his head, in a hall he has longed to visit a thousand times. If Dorian could conjure a place to forget where he had come from or where he was going it would be this.
“I have to leave,” he says to the innkeeper.
Dorian goes to the door of the inn and opens it. He expects the snow and the forest but he looks instead at a shadowed, snowless cavern. In the distance there is a shape like a mountain that could be a castle. It is very, very far away.
“Close it,” the innkeeper says behind him. “Please.”
Dorian hesitates but then he closes the door.
“The inn can only send you where you are meant to go,” the innkeeper tells him. “But that,” he points at the door, “is a depth where only the owls dare to fly, waiting for their king. You cannot go there unprepared.”
He crosses back to the fire and Dorian follows him.
“What do I need?” Dorian asks.
Before the innkeeper can answer the door opens, its hinges flung wide. The wind enters first, bringing a gust of snow along with it, and after the snow comes a traveler wearing a long hooded cloak the color of the night sky embroidered with constellations in silver thread. Even after the traveler pulls back her hood snowflakes continue to cling to her dark hair and remain sparkling over her skin.
The door slams itself shut behind her.
The moon goes directly to Dorian, taking a long parcel wrapped in midnight-blue silk from her cloak as she approaches.
“This is yours,” she says as she hands it to him, forgoing the unnecessary introductions. “Are you ready? There is not much time.”
Dorian knows what the parcel contains before he unwraps the silk, the weight of it familiar in his hand though he has held it only once before in a dream.
(If the sword could sigh with relief as it is taken from its scabbard it would, for it has been lost and found so many times before and it knows this time will be the last.)
“We cannot send him out there,” the innkeeper says to his wife. “It’s…” He cannot bring himself to articulate what it is and danger beyond articulation is worse than anything Dorian can imagine.
“It is where he wishes to go,” the moon insists.
“I’ll find Zachary there, won’t I?” Dorian asks.
The moon nods.
“Then that is where I’m going.”
(There is a pause here, filled only by the wind and the crackling of the fire and the hum of the story impatient to continue, purring like a cat.)
“I’ll get his bag,” the innkeeper says, leaving Dorian alone with the moon.
“This inn is a tethered space,” she tells him. “It remains the same no matter how the tides change. Once you leave here you will be untethered again and you will not be able to trust anything you encounter. There are things in the shadows, whether they were god or mortal or story once,