The border came not with a fence or a gate, but with a shift in the very air.

One moment the carriage rolled through sun-dappled pine forests, the sky bright and blue, the grass green and warm under the wheels. The next, the light softened to burnished silver, the trees grew taller and older, their trunks like weathered stone, and the horizon stretched out endlessly toward peaks capped with snow that glinted like diamond even in the half-light.

"This is the Northern March," Malphas said, leaning forward to brush a strand of hair from Aria’s face. "The sun does not set fully here until midwinter. It lingers, as if even...