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Rook shrugged and looked out into the village. “Up to you really. Since we don’t have a need for pissing people off today, figured you could come with me to check on the nets. Or we could use some mushrooms for dinner. You could go out into the woods to grab some if you feel like being alone?”

I frowned into the dark steam rolling off my tea. “You’d let me just wander out in the woods . . . alone?”

“If that’s what you want to do. I told you, you’re not a prisoner here. Stay, go, wander off and get eaten by wolves or something, whatever you want. Only thing we ask is that you contribute.”

“I cleaned at the palace,” I offered unhelpfully, opting not to mention the other things I was forced to do.

“Most do from how I hear it.” Another sip this one ending in a shrug. “Most of us keep our own cabins. You’ll be hard pressed to find one of us that would need something like that. What did you do back in the real world?”

I frowned and took another few sips of tea, letting silence pool between us. The real world. Like this wasn’t real, like any of us would just wake up at any minute. He had no clue that for me, this was the real world, and the human world had been the nightmare without me even realizing it.

A familiar bitterness boiled up in my stomach. What a pretty dream for them to hold onto, that one day they might go back to what they had been stolen from. I was envious of them. I was from Magh Meall, somewhere. There was nothing for me to go back to. No one to go back to. No one to miss or miss me. Somewhere in this fucked up world was where I was born, where I was from.

“I guess I could look for mushrooms. If you tell me where and what to look for. Never done it before.” It was the better of the options, some time alone. Time to think. Time to imagine what the next steps would be.

“Rook,” called a man as he jogged up, interrupting our conversation. “They’ve found him.”

Rook turned and frowned. “Alive or dead?”

The man took a long, deep breath and exhaled it. Rook nodded, turning back to me. “New plan, kid. Come with me. You’ll want to see this.”

Frowning, I took one last sip of my tea and followed Rook, dropping the cup off at the wash house. On the opposite side near a large, open area where the lanes all met was a cabin set away from the others. Like ours, it was a single room, but unlike ours there was a large porch on one side netted in with fabric letting the breeze come through but not the bugs and weather.

Rook leaned down and whispered in my ear, “Mind your manners in here. Rosalie isn’t as . . . kind as the rest of us.”

With that, he guided me into the cabin. Inside the cabin was dark except for a single lamp burning precious oil to cast a warm light through the room. At the back was a cot, a pile of blankets atop it, and beside it, a table scattered with herbs and a roughly crafted mortar and pestle.

“Rosalie.” Rook greeted the woman coming in from the screened-off porch, wiping her hands on a blood-stained apron.

The woman was older than I was, perhaps mid-thirties, well-rounded like Emerald, with dark curls pulled into a bun at the back of her head. She glanced up at Rook and then down at me before moving to the bed. “You brought an audience?”

“New girl. We go way back.”

“So I’ve heard,” Rosalie quipped. “She got a hard stomach on her?”

Rook looked back at me before answering. “She’ll do for now. Evan said you found him?”

She nodded. “Rough shape too. Looks like he got winged by a magic storm.”

“Magic storms affect humans too?” I asked, breaking Rook’s commandment to mind my manners.

The two of them turned to me, Rook with a look of “I told you to shut it!” and Rosalie with a careful appraisal that felt like I was being measured, weighed, and counted from top to bottom.

“Normally? No,” she answered me. “Older humans who have had extensive magical alteration or have stayed within Magh Meall long enough that the magical taint has worked into their biology, yes. Not to the extent of a Fae or a creature born of Magh Meall, but they can sustain some extensive burns. The magic storm wasn’t what took Nicholas out though.”

She pulled back what I had mistaken for just a pile of blankets and revealed a man with a thick, wooden stake driven through his eye and a nose that looked like it had been bitten off. All around him the rotting fur of some animal was sloughing into the bedding.

“Fuck.” Rook sighed and pushed a hand through his hair. “He went out rough.”

Rosalie nodded solemnly, sniffing as if stifling tears. A few more sniffs were given and then she turned her medic’s eyes on me. Her gaze brushed down me once again, this time slower, more measuring and calculating silently taking place behind eyes trained to see ailments. She stopped at my legs and lifted back up. “You injured, new girl?”

“Oh, um.” I shifted from one foot to the other, not entirely comfortable accepting more help than I already had from these people. “Yeah, it’s just a scratch though.”

“Places like this, a scratch from a stick can go from an annoyance to a death sentence faster than you can imagine.” She twisted, pushing open a dark leather bundle of some sort before splashing her hands with the sharp, bitter scent of pure alcohol. “Come on then, let’s have a look.”

I looked to Rook, his turbulent emotions tangling with my hesitation before he gave a sharp snap of his head as if to say I could trust the woman.

I didn’t trust her as far as I could throw her, but at least she could do something for my leg. So, I let her go to work unwrapping the dirty cloth from the ragged holes in my leg as she clucked in annoyance at the state of the bite.