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doing?”
    The faery merely lifts a finger, licks it with a quick darting tongue, and raises it into the air. “Feeling for wind. Under the right conditions, I’ll be able to open a door between the worlds without Lonnrach detecting.” She gives me a slow smile. “It’s a gift.”
    I narrow my gaze. “So you are Kiaran’s sister.” And you’re completely mental
.
    â€œHmm?” She’s not looking at me. With her finger still in the air, her eyes have gone shadowed, their molten-silver irises swirling and swirling. “No, you must be mistaken. I’m Kadamach’s sister. This Kiaran fellow sounds like trouble.”
    Confound it. “Kiaran. Is . Kadamach.”
    â€œAh.” She wiggles her finger as she checks the wind, never breaking her look of intense concentration. “Well. That certainly explains why you keep mentioning him,” she says absently. “I’m Aithinne. You must be the Falconer I’ve had a devil of a time finding. Pleased to meet you.”
    I finally notice the subtle resemblances between Aithinne and Kiaran. They have the same gleaming dark hair, the same skin—pale and shining like moonlight. And their eyes, while different in color, share a similar intensity. She presses her brows together in concentration the same way he does.
    For Kiaran’s sake—and for mine—I suppose I should be pleasant. “I’m glad you made it out of the mounds,” I blurt without thinking.
    The second the words leave my mouth, I regret them. I notice how she goes still, how her concentration seems to waver and the light fades slightly from her eyes.
    â€œAye,” Aithinne says softly. “I made it out.” Finally, she looks at me. Her gaze lands on my scars, on the one she noticed before that’s still bleeding. “And so shall you.”
    And now you know precisely how it feels to be that helpless
.
    Unlike Aithinne, I didn’t have a thousand faeries in the mirrored room to torture me. I won’t ever forget that it was your kin who put us there. That your precious Kiaran and his sister helped
.
    She was trapped there for more than two thousand years with the enemy in a tomblike underground with no escape. I couldn’t even begin to imagine what she went through.
    As if realizing I’m studying her, Aithinne sucks in a breath and concentrates harder. After a few quiet moments, she says, “I can’t open the door here. The wind is blowing in the wrong direction and we don’t have time to wait.” She presses her palm flat against the platform. “We’ll have to find it.”
    She’s speaking in riddles, for all I understand. “Find what? The wind?” Perhaps my sanity? I believe I have lost something after all.
    Aithinne gestures over my shoulder and I look. Oh, bloody hell
.
    Atop the cliff is one of the deep, dark forests I had seen when I first arrived. This one is so thick that no light reaches below the canopy of branches. The shadows there are a curtain hiding everything from view. The black metal treestower high, the area in front of them obscured by thick mist that settles at the edge of the cliff.
    I’m not at full strength to defend myself, and she’s suggesting we go through there ?
    â€œHell,” I mutter. Louder: “Couldn’t you open a door somewhere else?”
    â€œI could open one anywhere,” she says, not seeming the least bit concerned. “But if we don’t want Lonnrach to send an army after us in mere seconds, we must go through there. That’s where the wind changes.”
    I realize then that Aithinne is making our platform move out of synch with the rest of the rocks and buildings. We rise above the dark ravine, higher and higher, until we are level with the edge of the cliffs. From here, I have an even better view of the forest.
    If anything, it’s only more frightening close up. At least from afar the