“Could we hurry this up?” Hawthorn said as he pulled off his necromancer’s robe and dropped it on the ground. “There’s a chill out, and I’m not dressed for cold weather.”

“Well, you could start with keeping your robe on if you’re so cold,” Holly said.

He drew himself up and looked down the bridge of his nose at her. “That threadbare sack couldn’t keep me warm in the middle of summer. If I’m going to die of exposure, I’d rather not do so in shabby raiments.”

“It is cold out,” Hemlock said and blew on his hands.

“Well, if you two would give me a chance to think, then I could do the spell.” She picked up Hawthorn’s discarded robe and thrust it at him. “And you keep that. You can bear looking shabby like the rest of us for a little while.”

The brothers fell silent. Hemlock folded his arms and hunched his shoulders while Hawthorn frowned at the robe as he held it at arm’s length.

“Right,” Holly said. She cast a Calling spell, then waited, holding her breath as she listened.

“Well?” Hawthorn said. “Did it work?”

“I don’t know. Animals have minds of their own. I can’t make them come over. They have to want to, and I don’t know if two necromancer horses will want to come over. Or even if they’re close enough for the spell to work.”

“So what are we supposed to do in the meantime? Stand here and freeze?”

“Good grief. I’ll make a fire. Just help me with the wood.”

They gathered some of the broken parts of the wagon and put them in a pile. Holly set the wood alight and into a crackling campfire.

Hawthorn warmed his hands by the flames. “I suppose we’ll have to spend the night here.”

“Don’t start,” Holly said.

Hemlock squinted as he peered down the road. “Is someone coming?”

“Hopefully someone with a carriage who’s fond of making a little coin,” Hawthorn said.

Holly looked down the road, but she couldn’t see anything. She held her breath to listen and made out a faint thumping sound of galloping hooves. “It’s the horses.” She moved down the road. By the moonlight, she was able to make out the silhouettes of two horses, and…

“There’s a man on one of them.”

The brothers joined her. Hemlock summoned his fairy pocket watch light. Hawthorn conjured a goose with ivory feathers that glinted gold and silver.

“A goose?” Holly said.

“Geese are vicious,” Hawthorn said.

“Hawthorn got bitten by one when he was a boy,” Hemlock said. “He’s never gotten over it.”

“Yes, well, our friend approaching here isn’t going to get over it either if he means to cause trouble.”

Hemlock sent out his fairy, illuminating two black horses, upon one of which sat a rider tugging frantically on the reins.

“By the Nameless One, stop!” the rider cried as he and the horses drew closer. But the horses didn’t stop until they reached Holly. One of them nudged her with its snout. She smiled and petted it.

The rider slid off the horse and ran a hand over his flushed face. He wore the black robe of a Shrine necromancer. He eyed the robes Hemlock and Holly still wore with a dubious expression. “Who—”

“Attack!” said Hawthorn, and the goose honked and pecked the necromancer on the thigh.

The necromancer cried out and tried to back away, but the goose had his robe in its beak. They fell into a bout of tug-of-war before he remembered himself and started a spell.

“No!” Holly said. One of the horses head-butted him and knocked him down. The goose honked again, flapped its broad wings, and pecked at him some more.

He curled into a ball as he covered his head with his arms. “Get it off me!”

“We need to tie him up or something,” Holly said.

Hemlock ripped off the hem of the necromancer’s robe. But between the goose’s flapping wings and the necromancer rolling around, he couldn’t do much else. “Could you ease up on your feathered terror?”

Hawthorn examined his fingernails for several moments before he released his spell. “Told you they were vicious.”

With the goose gone, the necromancer scrambled to his feet and tried to run, but Holly tackled him to the ground. “Get him, Hemlock!”

Hemlock tied the necromancer’s hands as Holly sat on his back. She got up, and Hemlock pulled the man to his feet.

“What did I ever do to you people?” the necromancer said.

“You put us in boxes!” Holly said.

“And left us here to die,” Hawthorn said. “In the cold.”

“Where’s Hazel?” Hemlock said.

The man blinked. “Hazel? I don’t know any Hazel. And I didn’t put you in the boxes. I was told to deliver the crates to… well… somewhere. And so that’s what I was doing.” He sniffed. “It’s a thankless job a man has when he finds himself attacked by wild animals.”

“And tackled by young women,” Hawthorn added. “Yes, you bear a heavy burden in life. Where is this ‘somewhere’ you were taking us?”

The necromancer lifted his chin. “I can’t say.”

“It wouldn’t be the Sea of Severed Stars, by any chance?” said Hemlock.

The necromancer’s brow furrowed for a moment before he composed himself. “No.”

“You’re a terrible liar,” Hawthorn said. “Why were you taking us there?”

“I told you, I wasn’t—”

“Yes, yes, you know nothing of the Sea of Severed Stars. If we must play this game, fine. Why were you delivering us to this secret location then?”

The man put on a defiant expression.

“Maybe you should bring the goose back,” Holly said.

The necromancer flinched, but he remained silent.

“No,” Hemlock said. “It doesn’t matter why. If he was taking us to the sea, then we need to continue on and see if Hazel’s there.

“But what about Tum?” Holly said.

“What about him?” said Hawthorn.

Holly ignored him and turned to the necromancer. “What did you do with Tum?”

“Tum?”

“Yes, Tum. Cellar gnome, about this tall. Kind of obnoxious.”

The necromancer’s mouth hung open as he stared at her. “What’s a cellar gnome?”

Hawthorn snickered. “For once I envy a necromancer’s ignorance.”

Holly sighed. “Never mind. Let’s just go.”

She and Hemlock clambered atop one of the horses while Hawthorn and the necromancer shared the other. Despite her prodding the necromancer for his name, he refused to give it. So she called him Norman instead.

Hemlock’s fairy lit the way down the long, flat road. Moonlight lit the surrounding grassy fields and, beyond those, shadowed forests that stretched towards the star-shrouded night. In the distance, a mountain range loomed on the horizon. Holly had never seen mountains like that before. She wanted to say they were beautiful—perhaps during the day they were. But now they looked like a portion of the night had been cut away, leaving only a deeper, starless darkness that the moonlight couldn’t reach. Nobody spoke as they rode. The clip-clop of the horses’ hooves, the wind stirring the grass, and the occasional hoot of a distant owl were the only sounds to accompany them.

They came to a crossroads. Hemlock and Hawthorn brought the horses to a stop.

“Well, which way is it?” Holly said. “Do you know, Norman?”

Norman sighed. “Would you please stop calling me that? It’s a terrible name.”

“Well, you won’t tell me your real one. What else am I supposed to call you?”

He thought a moment. “Maldovar? That’s a splendid name.”

“No, you’re definitely not a Maldovar.”

Hemlock said, “We could split the difference and call him Malman.”

“Maybe,” Holly said.

“No!” Norman shrank within himself a little. “Norman’s fine…”

Hawthorn said, “While it’s very charming the two of you trying to name your pet necromancer, could we please choose a direction and get on with this journey? Riding a horse is terribly uncomfortable, smelly, and having to share the experience with Malman isn’t helping at all.”

“Norman,” said the necromancer. “We decided the name is Norman.”

“We might decide your name is Daisy unless you tell us which direction to take.”

Norman set his jaw and straightened his back though his eyes didn’t look as confident as his posture. “Do your worst.”

“Maybe we should split up,” Hemlock said. “Hawthorn and Norman will take one road. Holly and I will take another. As soon as one pair realizes they’re on the right track, one from that pair can take the horse and ride back to find the others.”

“That might work if we had two roads to choose from,” Hawthorn said, “but we have three. Not to mention that I’m not at all encouraged by the prospect of teaming up with Malman here.”

“Norman!”

Holly said, “I agree. I don’t think we should split up. We need to pick a direction that we all agree on.”

“Preferably before we all die in this cold,” Hawthorn said.

Holly gave Norman a pointed look. “Well?”

Norman avoided her gaze a long while. “Left.”

She blinked a few times. “Really?”

Hawthorn said, “If he said left, then we can assume that either the road straight ahead or to the right is the correct one, so that narrows it down.”

“Unless he knew we’d think that,” Hemlock said, “and it’s actually the correct course.”

“My head hurts,” Holly said. “So which one do we take?”

Nobody said anything.

Her gaze returned to the mountains in the distance. “Which road will take us to those mountains over there?”

Norman frowned. “Why would you want to go to the mountains?”

“It seems as good a destination as any, don’t you think?”

Norman shrugged and seemed bored with the question. “The road straight ahead looks like the most direct route.”

“Where does the road to the right lead?”

“I couldn’t say. I’ve never taken that road.”

“Because you’ve only ever taken the one on the left.”

“Yes. Exactly.”

It made sense, what he was saying. Holly had no idea what a sea of stars or souls would look like, but whatever it was, a mountain didn’t seem like it would fit. Of course, there was no telling what might lie beyond the mountain, but there was nothing to indicate that it was the right direction over any of the others.

“I think we should turn right,” Hawthorn said. “Norman claims to not know what’s in that direction, so obviously that’s the one he’s lying about.”

“Unless he’s lying about all of it,” Hemlock said. “Or none of it. Either way, I think we should leave Norman’s opinion on the matter out of it.”

It wasn’t supposed to be this hard. Choosing which road to take shouldn’t be the deciding factor on whether or not they would find Hazel. What if they made the wrong choice? They would travel on, looking for something that wasn’t there, possibly not ever realizing they had made the wrong decision. Not until it was too late, at least. The importance of this decision pressed on Holly. How would she ever be able to live with herself if she made the wrong choice?

She looked at Norman and found him staring at something further down the road ahead, his brow knitted and expression puzzled. She followed his gaze and, at first, saw nothing. Then just like the shadowed mountains looked like missing parts of night, a smaller shadow that looked like night itself bobbed along the road.

“What is that?” Holly said. When she turned back to Norman, his puzzlement had faded and he looked unconcerned.

“I believe it’s a raven,” he said.

“Raven?” Hawthorn said. “Wonderful. It probably means there’s a corpse on the road ahead. More reason to turn right.”

“There would be more than one raven if there was something dead on the road,” Hemlock said as he squinted at the flitting shadow. “And I only see one. I think.”

Holly didn’t turn to see if it was actually a raven on the road or whether or not there was more than one or whether or not there was something dead their noses would have to contend with. She kept her gaze on Norman. The way he had placed his bound hands on the horse in front of him, the way he carried his shoulders, the expression that had settled over his features suggesting bored disdain looked, when Holly looked closely, a little too carefully placed. He looked like a man who didn’t care—who wished to get on with the journey because sitting there was only growing increasingly intolerable. Yet his gaze, every now and again, would return to the raven on the road, as if his eyes had a will of their own. And at those fleeting moments, Norman looked… uncertain.

“I think we should go straight,” Holly said.

Norman glanced at her but then quickly looked away.

“Are you certain?” Hemlock said.

Holly continued to study Norman, but he had fixed his gaze on a distant point and refused to look at her again.

“Yes,” she said. “I’m certain of it.”

“All right,” Hemlock said, and he flicked the horse’s reins, and the animal resumed walking.

Hawthorn brought up his and Norman’s horse alongside them. “If there is a corpse on the road, then Norman has volunteered to clean it up.” He clapped Norman on the back, and the necromancer flinched. “Right, Norman?”

Norman said nothing, keeping his gaze fixed ahead. Holly did the same.