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She gave a small laugh. “Oh dear! I’m sorry, Emily. I have been trying to find the words, but—I’m afraid I would be interfering where I shouldn’t.”

“You needn’t worry,” I said. “I am not the best judge of the bounds of friendship; therefore you are unlikely to overstep with me. You are concerned for my safety—is that it?”

She looked troubled. “That is putting it mildly. Dear Emily—you have taken one of their thrones. Can you truly not guess how worried I have been? Thora too, and Aud—she writes me weekly to ask for news of you.”

I felt relieved. Not to be having this conversation, but to know that I had not angered her somehow, or otherwise caused her to question our friendship. “You know that I am one of the foremost living experts on the ways of the Folk,” I said. I was not worried about bragging, for this was a simple statement of fact.

“That is the problem,” Lilja replied. “Yes, I know that you know the Folk, but there is a difference between knowing and feeling. Those of us who live among them would never trust the tall ones. For all you have read about and studied the Folk, you have never truly lived with them, dear. They are like—like nature. Can you understand the feeling of a winter night, or a spring wind, if you have only read about it?”

This was an uncomfortable echo of something Farris had said to me once. I pursed my lips and replied, “All right. Let us accept for the sake of argument that you possess a truer understanding of the Folk than I, that books and academic knowledge are secondary to lived experience. What then would you have me fear?”

She hesitated. “Power,” she said at last. “In our stories, it is the great ones—the lords and ladies, the monarchs and generals, that one must avoid above all else. They are the true monsters lurking in the night.”

This again! I thought. Aloud I said, “I have heard a similar opinion recently from another friend of mine, who seems to think Wendell will abandon me to die of exposure or some such, I suppose when he becomes tired of me.”

“Oh, no!” Lilja said. “That is not what I meant—I don’t believe for a second that Wendell would harm you. But I worry there will come a day when you no longer recognize him. And what hurt is worse than that?”

I could not reply to this. There was something in her gentle manner that sent a spear of panic through me that Farris’s words had not, much as he’d clearly been trying to make me uneasy. Somehow, it laid bare the many times I’d voiced a similar fear to myself, before immediately burying it beneath other things.

Lilja seemed to regret her words, which naturally only made them keener. “Don’t mind me,” she said quickly. “You are the best judge of your heart, and of his. I am your friend, but that does not make me all-knowing.”

She seemed upset, but I did not know how to correct this; the conversation had gone beyond my ability to navigate. I could only say, “I will think on what you have said.”

She nodded, and we went back to the carvings. A few moments later, we heard Wendell calling me, and made our way to the front door with Shadow. There we took our leave. Lilja, I thought, hugged me longer than she ordinarily did.

The night was cold, the wind tossing sheets of mist from the waterfall into our faces. Wendell and I crossed the stepping-stones, but I stumbled in surprise when we emerged into the Silva Lupi, nearly tripping over Shadow.

“Where are we?” This was not the castle; we stood in the forest, possibly near the royal gardens—the grass held a scattering of daisies, whose seeds drifted from their beds into the neighbouring woods.

Wendell grimaced and looked about him. “The door has returned to its original location. A number of enchantments have been going awry like that. My stepmother’s curse is spreading—this way.”

Shadow and I followed him through the trees—it was a deer trail, nothing more, but he widened it with a gesture, opening and then closing his hand. “I must tell you what I’ve discovered,” I said.

“Yes,” he said over his shoulder. “Momentarily, Em.”

I felt a flicker of annoyance that he had so little interest in my research. Did he assume I had failed? “But I’ve found a solution to your stepmother’s curse.”

“I know you have,” he said, a little question in his voice, as if wondering why I’d bother to state something so obvious. “But you will only have to tell the story again for Niamh, and my uncle, I suppose, so let us wait until we can summon them.”

I was mollified.

“Wait,” I said. “You were skeptical before about whether I might find an answer in the old stories.”

“Not really,” he said, sighing. “I only didn’t want you to go away. I never do, but I feel especially guilty in this circumstance. I thought I would be showing you everything my realm has to offer—the lakes, the gardens, the brightest and the darkest parts of the forest. I thought I would be summoning strange and terrible Folk to dance before you, or give you presents, while you scribbled away in your notebook…Instead, we are forced to contend with my stepmother’s treachery. I’m sorry.”

“You say that as if you have dragged me into something,” I said. I regretted the change from his good mood, and added, “I’ll have you know that I find all of this—your stepmother’s treachery included—fascinating. I am making good progress on my book.”

He laughed, and the forest around us seemed to brighten. “Read me some of it later, Em.”

The leaves rustled as some small creature, faerie or otherwise, made its way through the canopy. My attention was caught by a line of flickering lights drifting along the forest floor, parallel to our path—initially I thought they were fireflies, but upon closer inspection I saw that they were trooping fae the size of my thumbnail, each carrying a lantern. Warm hearthlight glimmered from knotholes in the trees, and occasionally I heard distant, rowdy voices, as from a packed tavern. The branches in this part of the forest, near to the castle, where the concentration of common fae was greatest, looked as if they were strung with innumerable glittering spiderwebs, but these were only the small bridges used by brownies and suchlike, which clinked softly like bells whenever one of the creatures dashed across, moving so quickly I saw only the bridge swaying afterwards.

Wendell stopped here and there to examine a tree, pressing a hand to those he thought sickly or dull-looking and unleashing a burst of new growth, while worrying aloud about the state of the cottage in Corbann. It seemed he had been much perturbed by the disarray he had seen—wood shavings from Lilja’s carvings scattered about, rugs left unshaken—and wondered if he should assign a few of the oíche sidhe to put things back in order. At least, I think that’s what he was on about—I was too busy admiring the forest, which at night is such a perfect match for my childhood fantasies of what a faerie forest should look like that it left me breathless.

“What is it?” Wendell said after I again failed to respond to one of his silly complaints with more than a hm!

“What is what?” I said peevishly. My annoyance was not directed at him in particular, only I was wearied from the long day of travel and talk, not to mention worrying. “I’m merely thinking. Why do you assume something is the matter?”

“Em,” he said, “I am quite accustomed to the cadence of your silences by now. I know the difference between thinking and brooding. You may hoard your misgivings in your usual dragonish manner if you wish, but I will work them out eventually, you know. Spare me the trouble?”