Chapter One: The Lantern Road
Mira Vale left Hollowmere before the bells, her cloak pulled tight against the river wind and her green eyes on the road ahead. The Lantern Road ran east from the gate, and every post along it still held a lamp that no one had lit in forty years.
She carried only what the innkeeper had pressed into her hands: a heel of bread, a brass key, and a warning. “If the lamps start burning,” Tamsin Reed had said, her hair gone grey long before its time, “you turn around. Whatever you think you see.”
Mira had not promised. She had never been good at promises.
Chapter Two: The Toll House
By noon the road had climbed into the hills, and the toll house came into view, its shutters hanging open like a mouth. Mira drew the cloak around her and waited, her eyes forest green in the noon light.
Nobody came out. Nobody had come out for years. But on the step, set neatly in the dust, was a cup of tea that was still warm.
“Hello?” she said, and the brass key turned cold in her pocket.
Chapter Three: The Festival of Small Fires
Three nights later, past hills gone green with spring, she reached Emberwick in time for the festival. Children ran between the stalls with paper lanterns, and an old man in a fox mask sold candles he swore would never go out.
Mira kept to the edges, a green-eyed stranger among the bright coats, until a voice behind her said her name.
It was Tamsin. The innkeeper should have been three days behind her, back in Hollowmere, pouring ale. “You lit one,” Tamsin said quietly. “Didn’t you?”
Chapter Four: What the Lamps Remember
The bridge out of Emberwick was older than the town. Mira looked back once at the dark road and stepped onto it; and behind her, one by one, the lamps along the Lantern Road began to burn.