ON THE OTHER SIDE of the spiderweb bridge, the terrain quickly became rockier. Gwen’s shoes slipped on the stones, and she had to crawl across sharp formations jutting up from the ground. Without her pack, she missed something soft to lay her head on at night, as well as her dry socks and packaged food inside. She’d had a few loose matches in her coat pocket, but they wouldn’t even last her a week, and she’d never learned how to start a campfire using only stones and tinder. She was hungry and cold, and she agonized over the bird flying away with the Seers’ Glass.

After two more days of climbing, she decided to take shelter for the night against a stone wall. Although she was high in the mountains, the land had flattened here into a rocky plain, with patches of wild thistles. The sun began to set, and the color of the rocks deepened to purple, then finally to dark, midnight blue. The landscape was bleak and empty, and Gwen felt lonelier than she ever had in her life. She wished she could have stayed at Fairmount, with her new friends. She wished the Elder still lived. She wished to feel the weight of the heavy Seers’ Glass in her hands.

But wishing would not bring anything back. Tremelo had given her one task: to keep the Glass safe. And she had failed. The prophecies in the Loon’s book could only be read by using it. What if now they were lost forever, undeciphered?

If only she had gotten a closer look at the bird that had swooped in and grabbed the Glass, she thought. It might have been a vulture, like Sucrette’s—or even worse, one of Viviana’s horrifying Clamoribus birds, all clockwork and menace. But she knew better than to follow it and risk running into its kin. Her only choice was to continue to the highest peak, as the Elder had instructed her, and find the Instrument of Change.

At least the wild thistles were familiar to her. They were similar to the cast-off roots she’d cull from the market sidewalks as a child, and she remembered how to boil them down into a gruel that was filling, if not very tasty. She used one of her precious matches to light a fire and cooked herself a small supper of thistle-root gruel in the small metal bowl she’d tied to her belt.

The gruel was warm, at least—though she wished she had a pinch of sugar or something sweet to liven up the tastelessness of the thistle root.

The sun set over the mountains, and a bitter cold set in quickly—a harsh reminder that winter was not over, though Gwen had noticed some early-blooming berries at the edge of the plain. As she walked over to the bushes, the smallest of the owls half hopped, half flew to the berry bushes and hooted.

Gwen plucked one of the small red berries from its branch and sniffed it. She hoped they were sweet. She squeezed it carefully, splitting its red skin. Orange-pink flesh burst from it and trickled down her fingers. The small owl screeched, surprising her.

“What was that for?” she asked. She looked around the grove nervously. For the last two days she’d sensed she was being followed, but nothing stirred around her camp.

She lifted her hand to her mouth to taste the liquid from the berry. The owl suddenly leapt from the ground and batted its wings in her face.

“What are you doing?” she cried.

Then something extraordinary happened. Her vision clouded, and was replaced by an image of herself—but not as she was now, standing in the mountain plain, holding a burst berry on her fingertips. She saw herself lying on the ground, motionless, with traces of red juice on her lower lip. She realized that she was looking at herself from the owl’s perspective as it hopped around her face, trying to revive her. The berries, the owl knew—and now Gwen knew as well—were poisonous.

Gwen gasped as the vision disappeared. The little owl, who was still sitting on the ground between her and the berry bush, hooted at her.

“How did you do that?” she whispered. Her hands shook. She had never been so connected to her kin that she could see through their eyes. Even stranger, she saw something in her kin’s eyes that had not yet happened. Frightened and awed, she threw the crushed berry to the ground and carefully wiped her hand on her pant leg. She wrapped herself in her cloak and waited, unsleeping, for the dawn.