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“Is that a yes?” He huffed again, this time with an added little, rattling bark. “I’ll take that as a yes. I don’t trust that owl woman. I trust you, you’re the goodest of good boys. Do you know where the Abhartach manor is?”

Goose raised his head and turned to stare at me as if to ask either if I was stupid or if I thought he was stupid. I snorted a laugh. “All right, well you go to their court. Find the one called Brittle Spear. I don’t know what he will look like. And I have nothing of his for you to smell. But you’re a clever boy. You find Brittle Spear. And you bring him back to us. If we leave this place, can you find us?”

Goose rumbled a low, dangerous growl that sounded like sheets of ice scraping across each other, and I pulled another button from my dress, this time yanking free the lace from my chemise to tie it to his neck. “Use that. I . . . I don’t know how or if I could even infuse it with my magic. But this is me, big guy. You use this to come find us. Bring Brittle Spear back to us. I don’t care if you have to bite him and drag him. Okay? Can you do that for me, big guy?”

Goose rose and buried his head into the unbound length of my hair. It was so massive that some horses would have been jealous. His icy, wet nose found my pulse point, and he snuffled and whined.

“I know, bud. I know. I don’t want to send you off either. I’m scared of what will happen to us without you too. But I trust you. You and only you.” I pushed him back, but he leaned into me, whining more. “You gotta do this for me, sweet boy. Do it fast. Do it stealthy. Don’t get hurt. If you promise to come back to me, I’ll promise I’ll be alive for you to find.”

“You shouldn’t make promises to a failinis,” whispered Green Man in horror.

“I’m not. I’m promising Goose, Goodest of Boys, Destroyer of Spiders—”

“Chief Farter Supreme,” cut in Violet. It was true. Goose farts had cleared out our camp at least once.

I gave her a glare and returned to lavishing the best boy with attention. “—and Bestest Boyyo in the Land.”

Goose’s pitch-black tongue lolled out and his eyes rolled back in his head as he leaned into the ear scritches. “I trust you, big guy. Now go fetch me an over-sexed Fómhar Prince.”

I placed a kiss to Goose’s nose and he reluctantly pulled away. His dark eyes searched mine before he huffed with a suffering determination and walked away, swallowed by a dark shadow of a bush.

The four of us stood watching the shadow for a long while, as if hoping he would return to us. He had become my own shadow, and I missed him as such. To the others, he had become a steady guardian presence. The sensation of being vulnerable and exposed seeped into the edges of our consciousness, making each of us testy.

“He’ll be back,” whispered Violet, and the sound was more to comfort the slight shivers of Emerald who couldn’t pull herself away from the shadow.

Splitting up had never been a consideration for them, and now that we had lost the first of us the wound was deep. Green Man watched Emerald and Violet as they fell into quiet conversation. He settled next to me, his umber gaze fixed on the stone-lined pool we rested beside. “I know you hadn’t had a chance to really flex it at the palace, would have been too dangerous, but now that we are out here in the wide open, have you given any thought to trying to test your magic?”

I pulled a long, creamy, golden stem of what looked like wild wheat and rolled it between my fingertips. “Not yet.”

He turned his attention to me, and his leafy face softened just slightly with strange empathy. “It’s scary, huh?”

I nodded. “Been a human all my life. I’m sure there was a time in my childhood I might have believed in magic or maybe had a spell-casting phase, but the other world was always a scary idea for me. It was nice when I set it aside with the other childhood shit. I didn’t have to fear something that didn’t exist. And now it does. I didn’t have the softest of entries into it and an even less soft entry into figuring out that I could be a magical creature. So . . . I don’t know . . . I’m scared to even try.”

Gnarled, rootlike hands reached out and wrapped around my pearly hand and squeezed. My eyes fell to it. Green Man had never touched me before, and the feeling of his roughened bark skin caused a strange sensation to roll through my body. Once, when I lived with an elderly couple for a few weeks, I had been tasked with cleaning out their basement. It was coated from rafter to dusty floor with cobwebs. I could barely make it a single foot into the basement without getting horrifically tangled in their masses. His touch conjured that sensation. The mismatched information warred across my mind. My eyes said tree bark. My skin said cobwebs. And there was my brain, sat between the two squabbling siblings, just trying to tune them both out.

“You can’t run from it like you run from them mirrors.”

I snorted. “I don’t run from mirrors.”

I didn’t exactly run from them. I avoided them. There was a difference. Though the woman I caught quick glances of in reflective surfaces was stunning—ethereal, a beauty like no other—from her thick hips, slightly rounded belly, and full breasts to the slight dent in her button nose, she was not me. The regal goddess that confronted me every time I stepped within eye line of a pane of glass was not the haggard, tired, waif I was used to seeing, and I couldn’t reckon the two as one in the same. I was not worthy of her beauty. I was not worthy of the awe I saw in the reflection. I was just a street rat adrift in a glittering world waiting for them to realize the dirt under her hangnail-riddled nails wasn’t nail polish and eventually her grime would soil everything around her.

“Yeah? When was the last time you looked into one?”

I frowned at him. “I don’t like what I see when I do.”

“Do any of us?” He snorted and leaned back against the oak trunk I was lounging against. “Not my place to judge, mind you—I’m just a talking bush. But you’re going to have to deal with that eventually. One way or another.”

We fell silent, watching the tall grass dancing in a crisp breeze coming off the rolling hills around us. He wasn’t wrong. Both of those things were subjects I would need to address eventually. I couldn’t run from them forever.

“I wouldn’t even know where to start,” I finally whispered.

“I hear magic is pretty easy.” He didn’t bother looking over at me, giving me the privacy of brooding in peace.

“For all you know, I’m just like that Sapphire Speaker broad. Do the Fae have a name for a magical dud?”

He snorted, two of his leaves breaking off and accentuating the sound as they drifted away. “The Sapphire Speaker is no dud.”

“Oh?” Interest piqued, I sat up and watched him closely.