The road back was completely different.

  Same road. Same mountains. Same farmnd. Me, completely different.

  The Obsidian Court had mostly dissolved — word of the binding's restoration spread faster than any of us expected, and without Seraphine to anchor their belief that she'd remake the world in their favor, a lot of her followers turned out to have been operating on thin conviction. Most just went home.

  Dren walked slower on the way back. He stopped for lunch. On the third day over the pass, he pointed at a cloud formation and correctly predicted good weather by evening. He seemed to take mild satisfaction in this, which was as close to happy as I'd seen him.

  Lyra wrote essentially the whole journey. She'd already decided on a title: "Ashborn: A Practical and Historical Study." She consulted me regurly on what the binding had actually felt like versus what the historical accounts said it should feel like.

  "What did it feel like when both abilities worked simultaneously?" she asked at one point.

  I thought about it. "Like being both sides of a door at once."

  She wrote that down and nodded like it made perfect sense.

  Tam walked with me and filled in three years of Harrow's End in real time — who'd moved, who'd had kids, what the harvests had been, the ongoing feud between the miller and the baker over water rights that showed no signs of ending. The normal life of a small vilge, unfolding without me in it.

  "You're less quiet than you used to be," he said at one point.

  "Was I that bad before?"

  "Kael, you once went four days without speaking and only stopped because I physically blocked your path and made you answer a direct question."

  "That's not — I was thirteen, that was—"

  "You were sixteen. I kept a log."

  I had no defense against a log.

  We came over the western side of the Crestfell on a clear day, the whole valley spread out below us — farmnd, Cresswick's distant smudge of smoke, and past the Greywood, somewhere beyond the trees and the river, Harrow's End.

  I stood at the summit and looked.

  The Sealstone in my coat pocket. The mark on my wrist, steady and warm.

  Three years ago I'd walked out of that vilge with a pack and nothing else and told myself I was doing the right thing.

  I was walking back with everything I'd been keeping myself from.

  I started down the slope.