I took a step backward. “You’re not making sense.”
The ravens croaked in the trees around me, softer this time, almost like they were laughing. The man smiled, slow and cruel. “Aren’t I? If you’re a fool as well as a liar, that’s not something that can be held against you, but if you’re simply refusing to see what’s true because it frightens you, then I’m afraid I’ll have to hold everything against you.”
One of the ravens cried out—not a croak this time but a caw of fear and distress. The man’s head whipped around, focusing on the bird as it fell out of its tree, landing next to a jagged, bloody rock.
“Who threw that?” he asked, voice low. “I will have your bones!”
“Run,” hissed a voice from the shadows along the tree line. It was close enough that I flinched away, and more than half-familiar.
The man was starting to rise from his seat, rage all but radiating from his skin. Something about it was terribly familiar.
“Your bones and your skin,” he roared. His head swung around again, white eyes focusing on me, as much as they ever focused on anything—he couldn’t see me with his own eyes, I realized. He was watching me through the birds.
Which meant there was a gap in his sight where the bird had been knocked out of the tree. I turned and bolted for the opening, running as hard as I could, and his laughter followed me away from the firelight, into the dark beneath the trees.
• • •
I’ve never been much of a runner. Terror was enough to put some speed into my legs, but terror doesn’t last forever, and eventually I stumbled to a halt, heart pounding and lungs aching from the unfamiliar exertion. I braced myself against one of the unnervingly person-shaped trees, waiting for my breathing to level out, or at least to calm enough that I could hear if any birds were nearby.
Eventually, I stopped wheezing. I forced myself upright, listening as hard as I could, and heard nothing but the wind rustling through the leafless branches around me. If someone had been looking for a landscape to use as the definition of “haunted forest,” they could have done substantially worse than this one, which looked blighted in a way I didn’t even have the words for. The branches weren’t thick enough to block out this much of the sky, and yet they did, so completely that when I looked upward, I couldn’t see a scrap of starlight.
This place. I had never been here before, I knew that, but something about it was familiar, like I had heard of it in a story. Maybe I was asleep, and this was a particularly vivid, frustrating dream. Or maybe I had been magically abducted from October’s house despite the wards that should have protected me from anything of the sort.
I was putting a lot of faith in her wards, considering she was a changeling who had never shown much skill in anything outside of pure blood magic. But then, she shared her home with the King of Cats, his heir apparent, and a blind foster who was technically in trust to my father. Quentin might come from the least important noble family on the continent. He might also come from a family that carried a crown. Either way, Father would be held responsible if anything happened to him, and while my father can seem disorganized and distracted at times, he knows how to do his duty. He wouldn’t let Quentin live with October if he didn’t trust that she could keep the boy safe. So maybe putting my faith in her wards wasn’t so foolish.
And that meant this must be a dream, because I couldn’t have been taken from her house. I leaned my forehead against the tree, closing my eyes, and tried to focus on waking up. Nothing changed. I tried again, remembering the moment the elf-shot cure had filled my throat, and the dreams in which I’d been drifting had finally started to dissolve.
Nothing changed. I opened my eyes as I straightened, pulling one hand back to smack the tree, which hadn’t done anything to deserve my anger. I felt bad about hitting it almost instantly, and not only because the impact stung my palm. Clutching my hand to my chest, I turned and leaned back against the tree, resting the crown of my head against the wood as I stared up into the starless sky.
Wherever I was, I was really there. I had been stolen again, snatched from a place of supposed safety and thrown into the dark. This iteration wasn’t formless and black like the pit where Uncle Simon had thrown me and Mother, but it was dark and tangled and terrible and terrifying, and I didn’t dare go back to the firelight or the man with the ravens for eyes.
And just like that, I knew who he was, and who he couldn’t be, because Blind Michael was my grandfather, and he was dead, killed by October on one of her earlier hero’s quests. I’d still been running wild and bitter when that happened, but I’d heard about it—everyone in the Kingdom had heard about it, the way she drove blades of iron and silver into his heart, after she risked herself to save the children he had stolen.
I’d been taken by a dead man, and “impossible” is a nonsense word that’s more indicative of what people want to be true than what the actual truth is, almost always. This was really happening. That meant it wasn’t impossible.
“Are you done having your little breakdown, or should I come back later?”
It was the voice from before, still only half-familiar. I jerked away from the tree, looking frantically around as I tried to find the speaker.
He sighed, heavily. “Try looking up.”
I looked up. Not at the sky, this time, but at the nearby trees. And there, three trees over from where I stood, was a boy about my age, wearing simple, practical clothing—beige slacks and a loose white shirt with long sleeves and an undone collar. He was barefoot, which had probably helped with climbing the tree, and with sneaking up on me in the first place.
He nodded when he saw me looking, and dropped out of the tree to land in a crouch, which he straightened from slowly before he started walking toward me.
“Not who I’d have guessed I was going to see here, but hello,” he said.
I blinked.
He was a little taller than I was, with tawny tan-brown skin several shades darker than my own, and dark hair inexplicably streaked in green. His eyes were a very deep blue, and his hands were webbed, although not as dramatically as a pure Merrow’s would have been; the webbing only extended to the first knuckle.
And one of the fingers on his right hand was missing, cut off at the point where the webs connected. It gave his hand an asymmetry that was hard not to look at, even though I knew I shouldn’t. It’s beyond rude to stare, and would have been even if the missing finger hadn’t been my fault.
“Dean,” I said, shame washing through me like icy bleach. It left me cold and unsteady, stripping away what little calm I’d had remaining.
“Rayseline,” he replied, sounding much calmer than I felt. “Any idea where we are?”
Speaking it wouldn’t make it any more true than it already was, so I swallowed what I could stomach of my shame and said, “Blind Michael’s lands.”
“Your grandfather, the monster. The dead monster.”
I nodded.
“And I’m supposed to think us both being here at the same time is a coincidence?”
“I don’t know what you’re supposed to think, or what either one of us is supposed to think,” I said. “I don’t know how I got here. I was at October’s house, lying on the bed in the room where I’m supposed to be staying, and then I was in a tree.”