CHAPTER THREE

The wind died down, and a creaking cold took its place. Lin’s face was buried in thick, silky fur. She couldn’t move, for the creature was strong, and it squeezed her so tight that her slippers dangled in the air. Nevertheless, Lin felt the panic that had gripped her flowing out of her limbs, breath by breath. It was the smell, so strange, and yet so very familiar. Now that she was wrapped in it, she found that the musk was laced with other scents: nutmeg and sweet hay and woodsmoke. But she flinched again when the creature suddenly spoke.

“You’re here,” it breathed into her cardigan, sounding half-choked. “I was beginning to fear you weren’t coming!”

The embrace unraveled and Lin was dropped into knee-deep snow. She tried to step back, but the creature grabbed her shoulders. It was a rodent, five feet tall, with whiskers that brushed against her cheeks. The creature studied her so intently, it felt like she was about to plunge into its inky eyes. They sat high up on a tapering face that ended in a brown snout.

It was a face she had seen a thousand times.

Rufus.

Apart from the size and the long, green scarf around his neck, it looked exactly like him: the rusty stripe along the back and the soft, gray flanks; the round ears, so thin and delicate the twilight shone through them. A gigantic redback vole.

With trembling hands Lin reached up and touched the scruff under his chin. It was dense and glossy, the coat of a young, healthy animal. She buried her fingers deep, and he leaned gently against her hand.

“Little one?” she whispered.

“Hardly,” he replied, drawing his cleft upper lip outward so it revealed the long front teeth in a smile. “I’m as tall as you now. Taller, if you count this!” He swished his tail forward in a dashing arch and held it up for Lin to see. It was as thick as her wrist.

“You should be glad I still have this,” Rufus continued. “I’ve been waiting for hours. Do you have any idea how long that is here? I could have frozen my tail . . .”

Lin interrupted him with another hug. She felt so light-headed her thoughts were all jumbled. “Rufus! How? I mean, you’re so . . . You’re so . . .”

“Handsome?” He grinned. “Eloquent? Alive?”

“Yes!” Lin laughed. “All of those! And where . . . ?” She turned in a circle. There was nothing left of the wind but a wavy ridge in the snow. Rufus’s footprints led to the entrance of a small burrow, where the last embers of a campfire were winking out next to a little backpack. Lin’s own footprints appeared out of nowhere, and the wall and the grasping roots were gone. “Where’s Mrs. Ichalar’s cellar?”

“Gone, and good riddance. I went down there once, you know. A cellar full of skinned and mounted animals! No wonder the place smells cruel!” Quickly, Rufus got down on all fours and kicked a flurry of snow over the sputtering campfire. Then he grabbed his backpack and rose up on his hind legs. “Come on. I cannot wait to show you this.”

He guided her up a short slope, appearing perfectly comfortable to be walking on two legs. Lin trudged through the snow as best she could, struggling to keep her slippers on. She nearly lost her footing altogether when the crest of the slope fell away before their feet.

They were standing on the lip of a deep valley of hillocks and forest-clad slopes. Snow lay draped on the hillsides like a glittering mantle. A naked, frozen river ran along the bottom like a steel ribbon, and at the end of the ribbon twinkled the lights of a town enclosed by snow-laden trees on three sides and a lake of blue ice on the fourth.

The town was surrounded in a warm glow. Lin could make out a host of small spires, a soaring, slender tower in the middle of the town, and a white palace with a single dome. No snowy valley Lin had ever seen had boasted towers and domes like that.

Yet it was the sky that truly confounded her. Its colors were that of winter dusk, soft blue with golden, bleeding edges that told of a sunset beyond the mountains. Above the towering peaks at the end of the vale hung a most extraordinary light, streaking across the sky like a comet or a suspended shooting star. A halo of curved blades churned around its head, and its tail danced like northern lights.

Lin put her hand on Rufus’s arm, quite lost for words.

“The Sylver Valley. Quite something, isn’t it?” Rufus flashed his cleft smile again. “I watched the star rise from my camp. It’s a rare phenomenon called the Wanderer, and there’s this grand feast to celebrate it tonight. The bells tolled the third hour right before you arrived, so we need to hurry, or . . .”

In the distance sounded a long, shivering wail. Lin felt Rufus’s fur rise under her fingers, and she gripped it hard. She could only think of one creature that would howl like that. “Wolves!”

“Not wolves.” There was a new note in Rufus’s voice, hushed and tense. “I’ve been hearing them ever since the Wanderer rose. They’re somewhere deep in the mountains, but they’re coming closer. And I can’t help but wonder if it’s got something to do with your coming here.” He scanned the peaks behind them, whiskers wide. Abruptly, he pulled his backpack on and turned sharply to the right. “We have to go.”

He set off along the ridge at a brisk near-run, and Lin stumbled after him. Her slippers were starting to freeze around her toes, and her pajamas were weighed down by chunks of snow that clung to the fabric. She glanced back at the remains of the campsite. How was she supposed to go home? And what could be worse than wolves? “Rufus!” she called after him. “What do you mean, it has something to do with me?”

Rufus didn’t slow down. Though he dragged his bad leg slightly, he moved fast enough for the air to sting in Lin’s lungs. “I’m not sure,” he said over his shoulder. “I don’t know any details, because they never let me in on secrets like that. But I’ve seen the statues and heard the stories, so I know it’s something big.” He leaped smoothly over a shallow depression in the snow. Dips like that looked innocent, but Lin knew from skiing trips with her father that they sometimes hid cracks in the mountainside. If you weren’t careful, you could break your leg, or worse. She slowed down to measure her jump. Rufus turned back to catch her. “Watch that. I almost fell in the last time. This is where I arrived, too. I never had a key or a fancy gate, though. One moment I was lying in the cage, listening to your breathing. The next I was standing here on this ridge.”

Now Lin’s throat really hurt. “I’m so sorry . . .”

Rufus gave a little shrug as he tugged her along, leading her toward a small, dark rumple in the landscape. “It wasn’t so frightening, really. I felt light afterward, like a strap had loosened around my chest, and lucid, like a fog had cleared in my head. I had awakened. I didn’t know what to call it then, but I had changed into a Petling.”

“Pet . . . ling?” Lin panted. This fast wading through knee-deep snow wore her out quickly.

“That’s right. Nearly everyone who lives here in Sylver was once the favorite pet of a human child, so we call ourselves Petlings. Except the Wilders. Their ways are a little different. You’ll see for yourself when we get into town.”

Lin’s head spun with questions, but she was too winded to ask any more, so she just squeezed Rufus’s hand to let him know she had missed him, too. Rufus gave her a sideways look, and finally eased his pace a little. “I know that face,” he said. “I promise you’ll have more answers soon. But we really have to get back to Sylveros before darkness falls. It’s not just those howls. Teodor has been expecting us for hours, and he doesn’t like waiting. Which is why I brought you here.”

He let go of her hand. They had reached the dark rumple, which turned out to be a juniper thicket clinging to the ridge under a snowdrift. Lin leaned on her knees to catch her breath while Rufus searched around beneath the prickly branches.

“Ow, this stuff gets into your fur.” Soon he emerged again with a coil of dark blue rope in his mouth. “I found this the last time I was here. Help me get it out.”

He dug his legs in and pulled. Rodents were strong; Lin’s father had taught her. It was mostly their size that had them at a disadvantage from natural enemies such as foxes, owls, and lynxes. So Lin was not surprised when Rufus didn’t need her help at all. In a shower of broken twigs and juniper needles, he pulled it free: the biggest sled Lin had ever seen.

Rufus walked around the sled, whistling between his teeth. “Well, aren’t you a beauty!” And it was. It had a low seat of flawless, burnished wood and cast-iron runners that curled up into extravagant spirals at both ends. The blue rope was fastened to a silvered crossbar at the front of the sled, and there was even a little lantern. Beautiful, yes, but Lin knew at once they would never be able to use it. The left runner was broken, snapped off at the front.

“Too bad,” she said. “We won’t make it down the hill with a runner like that.”

“True.” Rufus opened his backpack. “But I’ve come prepared. I had actually planned on coming back here anyway. I couldn’t bear the thought of this wonderful thing being left to rust just because it’s a little damaged. So I had this crafted.”

He lifted out a piece of metal, curled into a spiral at one end, and hollow at the other end. A spare tip. “Come on, my friend.” Rufus hunched down to wiggle the tip into place. “It’s not as lovely as the original, but take it from an expert: any leg is better than no leg.”

The spare part slid on as if it had been made to measure. Rufus gave a little cry of triumph. But his enthusiasm paled some as they hauled the sled to the edge of the hill.

“It’s a little steep,” he muttered, chewing the tassels on his scarf. “But it took me ages to get down from this hill on foot, and Teodor did say ‘with all possible speed.’ Besides, you’ve done this plenty of times, right?”

Lin peered down into the valley. It was true that she had done a lot of sledding, and that the slopes behind Summerhill were not for the faint of heart. But this was no slope. It was an almost sheer drop that leveled out only as it disappeared under the eaves of the forest far below. Even Niklas wouldn’t be so reckless.

And yet Lin found herself climbing up behind Rufus, locking her arms around his waist, holding on to the reins. Snow creaked like fiddle bows under the runners as they hung over the lip of the cliff, but Lin wasn’t afraid. She even leaned out to see better, because she had this calming notion that they wouldn’t race down the hill at all, but float serenely off toward the suspended shooting star until she woke up from this strange and wonderful dream. And if not, the fall would surely do the job.

Rufus shivered in front of her, but if he was scared, he pretended not to be. “All right,” he said, leaning forward. “Let’s go find Teodor!”

They plunged into a wild, rattling stoop that kicked Lin’s guts up into her chest. She squeezed her eyes shut and waited for the jolt to shake her awake. But it didn’t. Instead the jolts kept coming. The hillside rushed at them so fast and the sled bucked so violently that it was impossible to know up from down. Spurts of snow whirled into Lin’s face.

She withdrew behind Rufus and opened her eyes. A wide, blurry shadow grew before them. They were going to hit the tree line at full speed.

When the forest swallowed them, branches whipped at their backs and twigs caught in Lin’s hair. Yet the sled lurched between the trunks in a series of miraculous escapes, until they slipped past a great oak tree and into a clearing in the forest.

The sled headed straight for a giant tree stump that stuck up from the snow. No, not a tree stump, but a well of dark stones, with a broken lid that had slid off to one side. There was no bucket, just a frayed rope, which dangled from the tarred crossbeam like a gallows rope. Lin bunched her fists in Rufus’s fur, waiting for the crash, hoping that she wouldn’t break any fingers or legs.

But right before they slammed into the well, the sled must have jumped a ramp of snow, because suddenly they were in the air. Lin lost her grip on the reins and flew off the sled. She landed face-first in a small drift that cushioned her fall. Her head rang with a weird humming, but otherwise she was unhurt.

“Rufus!” she said, getting up on her knees. “Are you all right?”

Rufus didn’t answer. He was already standing upright, mouth slack and whiskers spread, turned toward the cottage in the middle of the clearing. It was no larger than the old woodshed at the bottom of the Summerhill fields, with a sagging turf roof under a white blanket.

“The Winnower,” Rufus said. “But Sylver is protected. It’s safe. It just can’t be true!”

“What?” Lin searched the cottage for signs of danger. The timber logs glittered with rime, and so did the ramshackle porch that jutted out from the left corner. No smoke rose from the chimney, and the crude windows were dark. And yet she felt someone was in there, whispering to them.

A door grated around the corner.

Rufus turned toward her. Thin sickles of white showed at the edges of his eyes, and his voice was a broken squeak.

“Run!”