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“As soon as I know you are safe? Yeah. What did you think I was going to do? Drag you all over the Fae realm, dodging who-knows-what from every direction while who knows how many Fae are after us, and I don’t know how to use magic to protect you?” I didn’t let my eyes come away from the plank above me. I couldn’t look at them.

“Respectfully, Cri—I Don’t Know, that’s not going to cut it. You ripped the three of us out of the palace on this harebrained scheme. You’re stuck with us.” There was no amusement or mirth in Green Man’s tone, and I finally let my eyes slide away from the ceiling to glare at him. His ivy vine brows were pulled down into a scowl that matched the ancient doll’s.

Emerald, to her credit, was flashing an image of a switch blade being flipped by a disembodied masculine hand. Her emerald green face was amused by my foolhardy arrogance.

“You three don’t seem to understand the stakes here. If you are caught running—”

Emerald held up her glittering hand, and the smoke within her chest waivered. The image playing across it was from the perspective of someone running through a bramble of vines. Every time the pale skin of the person’s hand reached out to rip away more vines, insects and sprites fell on them. They were shaking with fear as they fell into a mud puddle. The person whipped their head around to look behind them. There was nothing there. They looked down and a pregnant belly, smeared with mud, came into view.

The shard in the center of my being dug in deeper. She had lost her child to the Fae because she had run. Or at least that was what she told herself.

The image dissolved into a new one, this one of me standing next to the perspective of the movie playing. I hated having to look at myself and tried to look away. The cold stone of her hand wrapped around my chin and drew me back. Her face was stern, filled with determined rage as she pointed at the movie playing. A sparkling hand set a massive iron shackle around my golden wrist and then around its own wrist. She tipped my head up to look at her again, and she grunted.

“Emerald . . . it’s . . . it’s too dangerous. I already risked your lives with this half-cocked plan. I can’t do it again. Not again. I don’t know anything about this world outside of the palace. I don’t know anything at all. I already lost—” I bit off my words and ripped my chin out of her hand and headed for the door.

“Running off? Typical,” huffed Violet. “Go ahead, run away. There’s nowhere for you to go. You can run all you want, little girl, but sooner or later you must finish this conversation. This isn’t Human anymore. You don’t get the pleasure of being thrown out by your family this time. You’re stuck with us.”

“What do you know about being thrown out?” I hissed as I spun on the small doll. She had struck that nerve on purpose and to make a point, but all it had done was sheer open the one wound I didn’t have the capacity to hide.

“I know enough about it to know that you’re looking for an exit rather than a way to stick together. And you gotta face that sooner or later. You want to keep running, fine. Run until you fall over. When you get back up, that problem will still be there. You can outrun that Fae that loves you, but you can’t outrun this.”

“He doesn’t love me. And this is a stupid argument. You’re literally asking me to drag you out into what is most likely a death march. You want me to just be okay with leading you out into – into – shit, I don’t even know what the fuck’s out there? And you think that’s smart? You’re always going on and on about me being stupid, and the one time I’m trying to be smart, you don’t listen to me? That’s fucking bullshit.”

“Matriarch’s right,” chimed in Green Man, his tree branch arms crossed over his chest as he watched me with a dark brooding in his glare.

“Not you too!”

“Yes, me too. And Emerald too, it seems. You don’t get to be a fucking martyr. We didn’t leave that palace just to be dropped off at the nearest shithole that will take us. We left with you. We are staying with you.” He pushed up out of the bed. “And now that that’s settled, I’m going to get water for a bath. You three ladies can fight over who gets the first water and who’s last. And who’s sleeping on the floor because even with the doll, the four of us are not fitting in that bed.”

“I’ll sleep in the stable,” I volunteered. I needed and wanted space.

He shrugged his wooden shoulders and slipped out of the door on his mission.

“Unless that’s a fucking issue?” I slung at the other two who kept baleful glares on me.

“Oh no, that’s fine with me. You snore like a drunken sailor. But you’re going to have to talk about what happened in the woods eventually.”

“It’s too soon.” I retreated. I was on the edge of cracking open wide.

“Lucky for you, there’s a lot of nothing between the direwood and the House of Magic. Plenty of time to tell us what happened.”

“And how do you know that?”

“Been in this hellish place for long enough to have been carted between court manors more than a few times. I was unlucky enough to have been to the House of Magic before it fell. We had to travel through the ‘wood to get from the House of Magic to Cailleach’s Keep. I don’t know where we are in the direwood, or if we even still are in the direwood, but if we are, then we are in between both territories.”

“Helpful.” I didn’t want to admit it, but it was.

A quiet peace fell over the three of us, left alone except for the occasional intrusion of Green Man as he came back and forth with buckets of water. I eventually joined him, having decided that Violet would go first.

When we were all bathed—and for the most part, clean—I took our clothing down to the river to launder them as penance for our argument. They all let me go without disagreement. I needed the time and space just as much as they needed to give it to me. It was a quiet apology exchanged between us.

Goose used the opportunity to stretch into his more comfortable form as we both lay on the bank and enjoyed the open sky and lack of walls around us. I had never known how much I missed the feeling of air around me. I felt guilty enjoying the peace of it all when I knew I had paid for it with something that I could never get back, and something I had taken from Emrys without his permission.

He too, would never get back the anam cara bond he had waited for his entire life. Would it put him in danger? Why did I care? Shouldn’t I hate him?

As much as I tried, as much as I bent myself into contorted strange shapes to hate him for everything he had done before I was born, before I was even able to know the weight of his decisions, I couldn’t.

It would be so convenient to dismiss the anguish burning and slicing through me as nothing more than the physical reaction to the stripping of what was supposed to be an essential part of Fae biology, but it would be a lie. Nestled next to the sharp grey of the loss was the same silhouette of heartbreak that I had when I’d been forced to walk away from previous lovers. It never got easier. It never changed, and yet it was always a fresh new wound to add to the tally sheet.