Wren steps left before her courage can change its mind. The Thornwood takes her in quickly — the mist closes behind her like a door, the wheatfields gone before she has walked a dozen paces. Old grey bark crowds the path on both sides. Bare branches interlace overhead, stitching the pale sky into fragments. The only sounds are the soft percussion of her own armor and the occasional drip of condensation from thorned boughs that reach toward her helmet as if curious. She keeps moving, because moving is easier than thinking, until she smells woodsmoke. Around a bend where two old oaks lean together like conspirators, a small fire burns in a ring of stones. A wiry old woman in a dead-leaf brown coat stirs a clay pot on the flame. A loaded mule stands nearby, watching Wren's approach with the unimpressed patience of an animal that has seen stranger things. The old woman looks up, squinting through the steam. "Sit down," she says. "You're listing three degrees to the left, and it's giving me a neck-ache just watching."