Grennick the Wanderer walked up the mountain like it was flat ground.

He didn't seem to need a path. He went up between the rocks and the pine trees in the dark and the snow, with his lantern swinging and his crooked staff tapping, and never slipped once, while Kestrin and Pell scrambled and fell and scraped their knees and tried to keep up. He hummed while he walked. Every once in a while he stopped and sniffed the air like a dog, and then turned a different way, and once he said "Hmm, no, not tonight" to nobody at all.

"Where are you taking us?" Pell asked finally, out of breath.

"Somewhere dry," said Grennick. "That's all anyone needs to know on a night like this."

Somewhere dry turned out to be a cave, high up under a cliff, with a narrow opening that you would never see unless you knew it was there. Inside, the walls were covered with a pale green moss that glowed softly in the dark, so they could see each other's faces without a fire.

"Hallow-light," Grennick said, when he saw Kestrin staring. "It grows all through these mountains. The Hallaskar light their halls with it. It's alive, so be polite to it."

He shared out bread and some hard cheese from his pockets, and Pell shared out the apples from her sack, and for the first time since the river, Kestrin stopped shaking. Then Grennick held out his hand.

"May I see it?"

Kestrin hesitated. Then he took out the half crown. In the glow of the hallow-light the three red stones looked like they were burning.

Grennick didn't take it. He just looked at it for a long, long time. Something moved across his face, something old and sad, and then it was gone.

"Your father told you what it is," he said. It wasn't a question.

"The mountain half of the Crown of Thalorn. He said the old smiths put some kind of power in it, but nobody knows what."

"Somebody knows." Grennick leaned back against the cave wall. "High King Thalorn was a good king, but he was surrounded by liars, the way kings always are. So the smiths of the mountain made him a crown that could not abide a lie. It grows warm in the hand of an honest man. It burns in the hand of a liar. And when a lie is spoken near it, the stones go dark."

Kestrin looked down at his hand. He remembered the forge, and Captain Malgrave, and the heat against his chest.

"It burned me," he said quietly. "When I lied to the captain."

"Then I'd advise you not to lie anymore," said Grennick. "It's a hard way to live. It's also the best way." He pulled his hood down over his eyes. "Sleep. We have a long way to go tomorrow, and the mountain doesn't care how tired you are."

In the morning the snow had stopped, and the whole world was white and blue and so bright it hurt to look at. They climbed all day. They crossed a frozen waterfall, and a skarn, which is a bridge made of snow over a crack in the mountain, which Grennick crossed by himself first, poking it with his staff, and then made them cross one at a time while he held a rope. Pell went first. Kestrin didn't look down. He looked down anyway. It was a mistake.

Late in the afternoon they came over a ridge, and there in the snow in front of them stood a tall gray stone, taller than a man, carved with two faces. One face looked up the mountain. The other face looked down toward the river, far below, where Kestrin could just see a thin line of smoke that might have been Fallowford.

"The fellmark," said Grennick. "The old border stone. On that side, the River Kingdoms. On this side, the land of the Hallaskar. Nobody from the river has crossed it in fifty years and come back to tell about it."

He stopped beside the stone, and leaned on his staff, and didn't go any farther.

"Aren't you coming?" Pell said.

"I can't," Grennick said. "I made a promise a long time ago, and that stone is part of it." He pointed up the valley with his staff. "Follow the frozen stream. Keep the twin peaks on your left. In three days you'll come to the Gate of Durrowhold. Don't stop at night in the open. And whatever you do, don't let go of that crown."

"But we don't know the way!" Kestrin said. "We don't know anything!"

"You know more than you think," said Grennick, and he smiled, and then a gust of wind blew a cloud of snow off the ridge between them, and when it cleared, he was gone. There weren't even any footprints.

Pell stared at the empty snow. "I really don't like it when he does that," she said.

"He's only done it once."

"I already don't like it."

They didn't find a cave that night. They tried to keep going, but it got dark too fast, the way it does in the mountains in winter, and finally they had to stop in a hollow between two big rocks and make a fire from dead pine branches, and sit with their backs together and the blanket over both of them.

That was when they heard the howling.

It started far away, up the valley. Then another howl answered it, closer. Then another, closer still. Pell sat up straight and took out her sling.

"Wolves?" Kestrin whispered.

"Not wolves," Pell whispered back. "Listen to it. Wolves don't sound like that."

She was right. They came out of the dark at the edge of the firelight, one, then three, then six of them. They were bigger than any wolf Kestrin had ever heard of, as big as ponies, with gray fur that was matted and spiky like thorn bushes, and long yellow eyes. Thornwolves. Kestrin had thought they were only in stories, like the crown.

The biggest one stepped forward, with its head low, growling a growl that Kestrin could feel in his teeth.

Pell's sling whirred once. The stone hit the big Thornwolf right on the end of its nose with a crack, and it yelped and jumped back, shaking its head. But the others kept coming. Kestrin stood up with his father's hammer in one hand and a burning branch in the other, and swung the branch at the nearest one, and it snapped at him and backed away, and another one came around the rock on the other side, and he knew there were too many.

Then the crown began to burn.

Not hot, like when he had lied. Bright. The three red stones blazed up through his coat so brightly that the whole hollow lit up red, the rocks and the snow and the Thornwolves' yellow eyes, as if somebody had opened the door of a forge. The Thornwolves yelped and cringed, and then they turned and ran, all six of them, back into the dark, and their howls went away down the valley until Kestrin couldn't hear them anymore.

The light faded. Kestrin sat down very suddenly in the snow.

"Kestrin," Pell said, in a small voice. "What else does that thing do?"

"I don't know," Kestrin said. And the crown stayed warm, because it was true.

Neither of them slept. At dawn, cold and stiff, they climbed out of the hollow, and found that they were surrounded.

There were at least twenty of them, standing in a ring on the rocks above the hollow, men and women in heavy fur cloaks and helmets with no shine on them, holding long spears pointed straight down at Kestrin and Pell. Their faces were hard and weathered, and their eyes were as gray as the mountain. Hallaskar.

One of them stepped forward, a woman with a long black braid and a scar through one eyebrow. She had a horn at her belt and a silver ring on every finger.

"River-rats," she said. Her voice was flat and cold as ice. "You're on the wrong side of the fellmark. I am Warden Hask of the Durrowhold patrol. Give me one reason I shouldn't throw you both back down the mountain."

Kestrin's hands were shaking. He reached inside his coat, slowly, and took out the half crown, and held it up in the gray morning light. The three red stones began to glow.

"My name is Kestrin," he said. "I'm the son of Doran Emberhand, and I've brought this home."

For a long moment nobody moved. Then, one by one, all around the ring, the Hallaskar lowered their spears, and knelt down in the snow.

All of them except one. At the very back of the ring, a tall Hallaskar man in a black fur cloak stayed standing. And Kestrin saw him smile.

* * *

To be continued in Chapter 4: Durrowhold