Give Me Your Hand!: Warm, folkloric and quietly magical

Give Me Your Hand! Kaleidoscope, Book 2 What is given freely is stronger than what is taken by force. In an autumn steppe, a young woman named Yasna finds an abandoned "golden" centaur child - a foundling everyone wants and no one can keep. To save him she must cross a world of giants, marsh-witches and floating islands, and face a collector of living wonders who has never met anyone he could not take. Yasna walks the roads alone, with only her dog-like companion Dir and the quiet counsel of Ilaria, a shape-shifting being of light. When she finds Morvan - a small golden centaur, warm and wordless, whom his own kind seem to have lost - she makes a promise she doesn't yet know how to keep. For the golden child is hunted. High in his mountain, the Darkest One collects the world's rarest beings and freezes them, living, beneath domes of glass. Black birds, a faun's enchanted flute, a whispering marsh - every road out is also a road toward him. Sheltered in turn by the underground giants, the forest witches, and Ilaria's flying island, Yasna learns the one lesson the Darkest One never could: that what is given freely is stronger than what is taken by force, and that a hand extended in kindness can outlast any darkness. Warm, folkloric and quietly magical, Give Me Your Hand! is the second book in the Kaleidoscope series - a portal fantasy about found family, courage that looks like tenderness, and the long road home.