Spring came the way it always did — crocuses first, then the river unfreezing, then that specific light quality that meant the season had actually turned for real this time.

  I stood at the Harrow's End gate with a pack and a traveling coat and the Sealstone in my pocket and felt, for the first time in I don't know how long, straightforwardly okay.

  Tam was already at the gate. Obviously.

  "Ready?" he said.

  "Yeah," I said. And it was just true.

  The miller's daughter came to see us off, which she'd apparently decided was her job now. Bress the bcksmith stood in his yard and raised a hand as we passed, which was more than I'd expected.

  And Mirca was in the garden, not looking up, which was exactly as much goodbye as she gave.

  I stopped at the gate and looked back.

  The vilge in the morning. Smoke from the bakery. The well in the market square. The granary with its repaired wall, already the same color as everything around it — you'd never know, looking now, what had happened there.

  Three years ago I'd walked out of this pce and told myself I was doing the right thing. Protecting people from myself. Staying small so nothing could go wrong.

  What I'd actually been doing was punishing myself for being fourteen and untrained and human.

  I looked at the mark on my wrist. Warm, steady, mine.

  Ashborn. Made of ruin and something else — the thing that comes after ruin, if you let it.

  I turned away and walked east.

  The Greywood on my left, green and familiar. I'd lived in there for three years. It had been shelter, kind of. But the shelter of hiding is different from the shelter of having somewhere to come back to, and I had the second kind now, and the first kind I didn't need anymore.

  "You're not going to miss the forest?" Tam said.

  "I can visit. It's not going anywhere."

  "Healthy attitude."

  "I've been working on those."

  He smiled that crooked smile. Same one as always.

  The road ahead — Cresswick, the pass, the eastern valley, Orenvast. Lyra and her research and the next set of problems, which I was sure existed because that's how things worked. More Obsidian Court remnants to deal with, probably. More ley-lines to assess. Maybe other Ashborn to find, if Lyra's theory about them not being entirely extinct was right.

  More to learn. A lot more to learn.

  That was fine. Dren had said the practice continues, and he'd been right about most things.

  I walked east into the spring morning, and the road was long and the light was good and I had no idea what was coming and I was, weirdly, fine with that.

  First time for everything.