Aerin had not yet learned the rules. At thirteen, she moved like a stray sunbeam in a house full of careful people—curious, clumsy, stubborn. She would linger at the ridge path when grain needed carrying, peering out where the pines tightened and the land dropped away. She would thread her fingers into the knobbled roots of memory trees and ask them what lay past the last stone marker. Each time, an old aunt would snatch her scarf tighter and say, “Aerin, child, shadows are for sleeping. Keep to the bowl and the loom.” Each night Aerin dreamed of a pair of hands—too long, too dark, fingers tipped like the spires of the mountain—offering her a small, bright thing she could not name.
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For a moment there was silence deep enough to turn the pine trunks into columns of shadow. Then the air shifted like a cape being folded. A figure unfolded from it: not quite a person, not quite a shadow—but a shape suggestive of both, tall and slim and wearing a cloak that blurred where it touched the ground. Its face was indistinct, as if sketched in smudged charcoal, but its hands, when it reached forward, were clearer—elbow-ridged, patient, fingers ending in the slender tips she had seen in dreams. She would thread her fingers into the knobbled