I've done a lot of dumb things in my seventeen years, but letting a complete stranger convince me to leave the woods might be in the top five.

  Let me back up.

  My name is Kael Dawnridge, and for the past three years I've been living alone in the Greywood — a forest about three miles east of a village I'm no longer allowed to call home. I trap rabbits. I sell pelts at the market in Cresswick without making eye contact with anyone. I keep my fire small.

  That last one's important.

  The morning everything changed started normal enough. Cold, quiet, the kind of early autumn dawn where the light comes down through the trees in long golden strips and the whole world smells like pine and damp earth. I had my morning fire going — barely more than a candle's worth of flame, just enough to warm my hands — and I was crouching over it the way I did every morning. Not exactly enjoying it. More like... reminding myself I could control it.

  Three years of practice. Three years of keeping everything locked down tight.

  I heard her before I saw her.

  CRACK. Then a series of crashes that moved through the canopy above me like a bowling ball through a china shop. Branches snapping. Leaves shredding. And then — THUD — something hit the ground about fifteen feet to my left hard enough to shake it.

  I was on my feet instantly. My right hand came up on reflex, and I felt the familiar heat gathering in my palm — that horrible pressure that lived under my skin and waited for moments exactly like this.

  I clenched my fist. Swallowed it back down.

  Not now. Not ever again.

  I breathed. Then I went to look.

  It was a girl. Maybe twenty years old, tangled in a length of rope that had caught on half the branches on her way down. She was crumpled in the bracken in a way that would've looked like death except she was swearing in at least two languages, and I'm pretty sure one of them she was making up on the spot.

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  I looked up. Through the gap she'd torn in the canopy, I could see the unmistakable silhouette of a courier's air-skiff drifting away on the morning wind, its rigging trailing behind it like the world's worst kite.

  She had literally fallen out of a ship.

  "Hello?" I said.

  She twisted around in the bracken and finally got a look at me. Sharp face. Dark brown skin. Short hair currently accessorized with three leaves and what I'm almost certain was a caterpillar. Her eyes were this striking amber color, and they were doing a full security scan on me.

  "Are you going to help me or just stare?" she demanded.

  I opened my mouth. Closed it again. I hadn't talked to anyone in two weeks.

  "Are you hurt?" I finally managed.

  "Probably. I won't know until I'm not hanging from a tree like expensive laundry. Are you armed?"

  "I have a hunting knife."

  "Perfect. Use it on this rope."

  Her name was Lyra Voss. She had bruised ribs, a wrenched shoulder, and absolutely zero patience for small talk. I spent ten minutes carefully cutting her free so she didn't fall on her head, and she bore the whole thing in silence.

  When she was on her feet, she did a quick check of her limbs like she was running a damage report on herself, then looked at me.

  "You're not with the Obsidian Court?"

  "The what?"

  She relaxed maybe fifteen percent. "Good. Then I need to talk to you." Her eyes dropped to my right hand — the one I was still holding slightly behind my back, because old habits — and something in her face changed. "Show me your wrist."

  I went still. "Why?"

  "Because I've been searching for someone for three months, and I've just fallen out of an airship, and I would really like to know if it was worth it."

  The 'please' she added after a second caught me off guard. It had been a long time since anyone asked me for anything with a please.

  Slowly, I turned my wrist up.

  The mark had been there since the night everything went wrong. A whorled pattern of silver-grey on my inner wrist, like someone had drawn a small sunburst in ash. I'd spent three years keeping it covered. Telling myself it didn't mean anything.

  Lyra stared at it. Then she closed her eyes, tilted her head back, and let out a breath that sounded like someone who'd been holding it for months.

  "What?" I said.

  "Nothing," she said. Then: "Everything." She opened her eyes. "Sit down, Kael. I have a story to tell you, and you're not going to like most of it."

  I should have said no.

  I should have told her to take her mysterious mark-recognition and her falling-from-the-sky energy and find someone else.

  Instead, I sat down.

  Looking back, that was probably the moment my quiet little life ended.