Lena Dabrowska was fourteen years old and carried her grandfather's clay pouch. The town of Przyprogu lay on the River of Frost, where night teaches silence. The stones on the shore whispered as the light of the first star touched them. Grandfather used to say that a whisper is a map, if you know how to read it. That evening the whisper called her name, as if it knew her every step. For a year she had felt that the answer lay not in the people, but in the stones. It was the eve of the First Hag, when everyone was sticking rowan branches into the ground. Lena slipped out from under the lanterns and ran towards the old riverbed. Her sack clattered against her hip and her fingers slipped over the cold, smooth flint. The murmur grew into a melody whose notes arranged themselves like footsteps on a bridge. The Rune Bridge was forbidding, but the bans sounded weak with such a call. She promised to be back before the stroke of nine, but the promise began to crumble. The water evaporated in rivulets that swirled like a record of words over a mirror. On the middle span she found a slab of grooves, one empty, as if waiting. She took a flint from her pouch and pressed it into the groove until it clicked softly. A pale mark ran across the wood, like a line of wind, and stopped. The river had quietened so much that she could hear her own breathing and delayed footsteps. - Who's there? - She asked in a whisper, not wanting to shatter the silence like glass. The sign broke into tiny runes, laying the map over the edges of her hands. The air thickened, taking on the taste of metal and the pungent mint of the shore. A short boy, all in blue linen, slid out from the supports of the bridge. - 'You're late,' said Natan, whom Lena knew only from her grandfather's stories. - 'The stones chose you Guardian of the Flow before you were even born.' The bridge trembled and the river flowed upwards, turning the current like a page. A shape appeared on the water, like a door that someone had just opened. The shape began to turn slowly, letting out discs of light across the dark depths. - 'Don't open it,' Natan whispered, raising his staff, but the runes had already ignited. Lena felt the flint in the groove twist of its own accord, and could not move her hand.