“How did you get out of the tree?”
He sounded like he was actually interested, so I shrugged and said, “I fell.”
He laughed.
I don’t like being laughed at. I bristled, glaring at him. “It’s not that funny!”
“It is, though. The kidnapper gets kidnapped, and the first thing they do is leave you up in a tree.” He calmed, glaring at me. “I let them wake you up. That’s the last bit of courtesy you get from me. I still know what you are.”
“Lost, confused, and a little sore from falling out of a tree?” I ventured.
“Monster,” he replied, almost calmly. “You’re the person who kidnapped me and my baby brother, and nearly killed us both in the process. Elf-shot isn’t a useful punishment. People don’t learn from their mistakes because they sleep so long their lives pass them by, they don’t get better, they don’t change. October saved us, and if she wants to save you, too, I’ll let her, because I’m not the one who gets to tell her who’s worth saving. But that doesn’t mean I’m going to forgive you, or that I’m going to forget what you did to us. I don’t want you anywhere near me.”
“So why did you save me from . . . ?”
“From Blind Michael? Because he may be your grandfather, but he’s still a bigger monster than you ever were. I wouldn’t shed any tears for you. That doesn’t mean I want to make him any stronger than he already is. Stay away from him . . . and stay away from me.”
Dean turned then, walking off into the forest, leaving me even more confused.
What the hell was going on?
• • •
One thing people don’t consider much about elf-shot: while you’re elf-shot, you’re stopped. You sleep, and that’s all you do. You don’t starve or die of thirst, you don’t wet yourself because you can’t wake up to go to the bathroom, nothing. You just exist. I’d been just existing for so long that I flinched when my stomach growled, not fully recognizing the sound.
It growled again. I realized what it had to be and sighed, rubbing it with one hand.
“We’ve been hungry before,” I informed it. “We’ll be hungry again. You can deal with this.”
My stomach kept growling, making it clear that it didn’t believe me in the slightest. I sighed a second time, looking around the forest.
There was nothing obviously edible in sight, no berry bushes or possibly questionable mushrooms. Nothing. I turned in the direction Dean had gone. I was probably the last person he wanted to see, but he seemed to have a better grasp of this place than I did; maybe he could tell me where to find something I could eat. And if he couldn’t, at least I wouldn’t be hungry and alone.
I started walking after him, looking down to track his footprints in the leaves. Nothing had disturbed them since he passed; his trail was clear. I kept walking, stopping whenever I heard a sound, but as none of the sounds came from a raven, I felt relatively confident in continuing on my way.
I’d walked almost as far as I’d run when fleeing from my grandfather before a low rock wall appeared ahead of me, the individual stones stacked so that gravity held them together, each covered by a thick layer of moss that was the greenest, most living thing I’d seen since we arrived here. The trail led me to the base of the wall, and so I continued cautiously toward it, pausing when I got there to lean up onto my toes and look over the wall.
On the other side was a garden, in disrepair but still fruiting. Tomato plants and long vines covered in runner beans, half the fruit rotting where it hung, the other half looking perfectly safe to eat. Dean’s footsteps continued through the wreckage.
My stomach growled again. I scrambled over the wall and tumbled down on the other side, landing once more on my poor, abused behind. I didn’t wait for the aching to fade this time, just got to my feet and began filling my hands with tomatoes and beans, corn and blueberries. All the fruit had a dry, almost mealy taste to it, like half its moisture had been transformed into dust. I still chewed and swallowed every scrap I’d stolen. Theft was an insult. Pointless theft was an offense.
This garden, withered and wasted as it was, had nourished me, and I would remember that. I swallowed the last bite of bean, bowed respectfully to the plants, and resumed my pursuit of Dean.
His trail only went a short way before it bent toward another cluster of stone ruins, this one even more shattered than the ones around Blind Michael’s bonfire. The walls were broken and crumbling, seemingly held together by patches of moss and clinging ivy. Nothing even resembling a roof or window remained. But I could smell smoke, not that far in the distance, and Dean’s footsteps seemed to be heading in that direction. I continued onward.
There was a gap in one of the damaged walls. I ducked through it and found myself in a small clearing tightly ringed with trees, their branches twisted so tightly together overhead that a passing raven would have had little chance of spotting the occupants. There was a bonfire there, much smaller than Blind Michael’s, and three figures sat around it. Dean, another boy whose near-skeletal frame and foam-white hair marked him as at least partially Sea Wight, and a girl in patchwork leather armor who looked as if she’d been cobbled together from half a dozen different types of fae.
Her ears were long and furred, like a rabbit’s, which should have been an indication that she was at least part Pooka, but one of her legs ended in a horse’s hoof, while the other was a more standard foot. Her face was a blend of Daoine Sidhe, Gwragen, and Baobhan Sith, while her eyes were an almost-luminous shade of yellow that would have been far more at home on one of the Cait Sidhe or Reynardine.
One ear twitched as I stepped through the wall, and she glanced in my direction. “I thought you said you’d shaken her off in the woods,” she said, voice roving up and down octaves in an uneven sliding pattern, one word high and piping, the next low and sultry.
“I thought I had,” said Dean, defensively. He turned to glare at me. “Did I ask you to follow me here?”
“Did I ask you to leave me alone in the woods?” I countered. “What the hell is going on? How the hell are we in Blind Michael’s lands?”
“You’ve answered yourself in the asking: These are Blind Michael’s lands, and here, all that matters is his will,” said the girl, turning to focus on me. Her ears twitched as she did, rotating slightly, so that they were also pointed in my direction. Everything I said, she’d hear. Maybe everything I didn’t say as well.
“How did we get here?”
“That, I don’t know,” she said. “Master seems to think there was a Ride to gather new children for his stable, but there wasn’t. There hasn’t been a Ride since he died. Mistress doesn’t stand with the theft of children, says we have to be better than he was if we ever want to win our way out of this wood. Not all of us do. Some of us have been here so long there’s nowhere else for going off to. Some of us know this is the best place for us to be. So we wouldn’t care if there were a Ride, but there wasn’t one. Don’t know why everyone believes there was. Don’t know why the Master’s back, either. He’s been dead a while. Dead people usually stay that way.”
She sounded affronted by the fact that he hadn’t. I blinked, very slowly, as I looked to Dean and the other boy.