Perrin was the youngest of the three riders, and the only one still nervous about flying geese-back toward Mount Kestrel with a captured piece of sunlight cupped in his hands.
“Don’t grip it so tight,” called Ordway, the eldest, from the goose riding just ahead. “It’s not fire. It won’t burn you. But it will go out if you hold it like you’re afraid of it.”
Perrin loosened his hands, and the orb in his palms brightened immediately, as if it had simply been waiting for permission to be seen properly. Three hundred years, the elders said, Mount Kestrel’s peak had gone dark — its old beacon-fire smothered by a winter that never should have lasted this long — and three hundred years the village below had waited for someone brave enough to fly true sunlight back up to relight it.
“What happens if we drop them?” Perrin asked, watching the snow-capped peak grow larger ahead.
“Then we go back down and catch some more,” the third rider, a woman named Sable, said simply. “The sun doesn’t run out of light for asking twice.”
It steadied him more than he expected. They came in low over the summit and set their orbs one by one into the ancient stone brazier that had waited three centuries for exactly this. The light caught immediately — brighter than any ordinary fire — and somewhere far below, Perrin knew, someone was looking up right now and seeing the mountain answer back for the first time in longer than most of them had been alive.