"Her visions are rarely wrong," he murmured to Cora. "If she says someone's on that mountain..."
I pulled out a notebook. Started writing.
I had so much to learn. Years of training. A mountain that had killed better climbers than I would ever be. And at the top of it, a wolf that everyone had already given up on.
Death while breathing,Gregor had said.
But I'd seen those eyes. Tired and furious and refusing to disappear.
That wasn't death.
That was someone waiting to be found.
I was going to find him.
Chapter one
The bus dropped all of us at the bottom of the mountain.
Of course it did.
I shouldered my pack and watched the taillights disappear around the bend, leaving me with two miles of switchbacks and the kind of silence that only exists this far from civilization.
I adjusted the straps—weight centered, nothing shifting—and started walking.
The cold hit immediately, sharp and clean, the kind that woke you up whether you wanted it to or not. September above the Arctic Circle wasn't playing around. I breathed it in anyway, letting it settle into my lungs.
Missed you too.
The trail was well-maintained but steep, designed to make you work for every foot of elevation. I set a steady pace—not fastenough to burn out, not slow enough to let the cold seep in. Two miles. Two thousand feet of gain. I'd done worse in training.
What I hadn't done was this specific hike.
That bothered me.
Seven years of preparation. Every book on Frosthaven I could find, every former student I could corner at pack gatherings, every scrap of information about curriculum and culture and unwritten rules. I’d built a mental map of this place so detailed I could probably navigate it blindfolded.
And still, the hike caught me off guard.
Not because I’d never been here before — I had. Plenty of times. Carefully supervised visits. Annual check-ins. Field trips where we were shown exactly what Frosthaven wanted visitors to see.
But I’d never walked this path.
This wasn’t part of the tour.
Which meant it wasn’t an oversight.
It was a threshold.
And crossing it meant Frosthaven had finally decided I was old enough to be tested instead of protected.
I didn’t like how many other things that made me wonder about.
Either this was new, or they hadn't thought it mattered.
Both options sat wrong in my chest.
I filed it away and kept climbing.
