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summer—and had in fact been hoping Fenn would have a collection of books she could borrow from. Her things arranged to her liking, she turned her attention to her clothes.
    Since there was no closet, she had little choice but to leave them in the trunk. Briefly she sorted through it. The stylishly rugged clothing she had bought from an expensive outdoor firm for her summer in the mountains, she wanted on top. But as for her good clothes—there were so many more of them! Not having the attention of a father, she had at least consoled herself by spending the money he sent her, so that her wardrobe had become quite a fashionable collection. She shook out her latest find, a sable-black dress without a single accent to relieve its severe aspect except its fine cloth and exquisite cut. The girls in her hall had mutually pronounced it too plain and somber—until Sevana had put it on. But Sevana had never had any doubt. With her inherent artistic sense, she knew exactly how to create the looks she liked. And how she liked that elegant black dress!
    Thinking now of her friends, she realized she felt no deep loss in having said goodbye to them. She liked many of them, but had forged no deep attachments that made it difficult to part company. Never unpopular, she nonetheless had not been perfectly suited to the school scene—too idealistic by nature to be vitally interested in the everyday activities around her, too goal-oriented among classmates uniformly more frivolous, too independent to be swept along in a crowd. And that fact only served to increase her sense of loneliness now, as one detached from her past and unacquainted with her future, so she didn’t seem to belong anywhere. She folded the dress and buried it deep in the trunk with her other good clothes. She would have no use for it here.
    Snapping the lid, she pushed the trunk against the wall, straightened the bed, and was finished with her room. She started downstairs, but as she passed Fenn’s door standing ajar, she couldn’t resist a peek inside.
    His room had the same bench-style bed built into the gable, but boasted two windows and more space—although it seemed smaller because of the snowshoes, camping gear, and other sporting equipment that crowded it. There was also an eye-opening amount of weaponry—rifles, pistols, knives, a bow and arrows, and boxes of ammunition stacked high. But that room contained more than the tackle of an outdoorsman. There were the books she’d been hoping for, more even than she would have predicted: three long shelves below the big window on the front wall, crammed end-to-end.
    Sevana knew she didn’t belong in that room, but she stepped in just to glance over the titles, not only to see what she could expect to read that summer, but also to learn where his interests lay. She was startled, therefore, by the volumes that met her eyes: weighty tomes of ancient history and mythology, strange volumes of metaphysics and philosophy, malevolent chronicles of crime and war—books of a deep, even a morbid, thinker. Similarly, the few novels he owned were dark and macabre. Aghast, she took hasty leave of that foreign environment and went downstairs, soberly wondering if she and Fenn could ever be close, when they appeared to have so little in common.
    Out in the cold sunshine, where the air rising out of the valley was bringing with it the river’s echo more clearly that morning, she tried to decide what to do with the day. Trapper was picketed under a spindly apple tree below the house, industriously clipping off the dewy blades of grass. She would have liked to take him for a ride, but didn’t dare without Fenn’s consent. More than anything, though, she just wanted to get to a high spot where she could see above the mountain walls and make some sense of this place where she had come to stay. Right now, she felt nothing so much as blind and directionless amid the mazelike ranges.
    Thus compelled, she set up the lane past the