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“Yeah. It’s no big deal. It just—”

“Tears her stomach up something good. While back, I caught us a small leaf fawn. Delicious. Roasted it up with some herbs. She took one bite and puked for hours. Thought, oh, maybe it’s just red meat. She managed to get down a few bites of some lionfish a couple of days later. She was puking and shitting blood for two days.”

“Yeah, thanks, I don’t think she needs to know all that.” It wasn’t untrue. I didn’t like the embarrassment of some stranger knowing it. I’d been convinced I was going to die. It felt like the knife lodged in my ribs had taken a lovely walkabout and was doing pirouettes through my digestive track. Every muscle and organ felt fit to riot and rip themselves clean off my bones and run screaming from the exactly four bites I had taken.

In Human, I’d had food poisoning exactly once in my entire life, an especially cold winter when I’d lost four jobs and two of them had stiffed me on my pay. I’d lost my apartment, and I’d lost every one of the ten or so items I owned by that point due to the landlord locking me out. At night, when the weirdos and creeps crawled around under the bridges and overpasses where I’d sleep during the day, I’d find a restaurant dumpster to find a few bites in. The first time I did it, I cried for hours. The humiliation, the degradation, the way I was no better than a rat, shaved parts of my soul off that I don’t think ever truly grew back. The fateful dumpster had been a drugstore dumpster. They’d thrown out case after case of meal supplement drinks. By then, it had been nearly a month since I’d had an interview, let alone landed a shit job, and I was all but numb to the depths I had fallen. I didn’t even consider why something shelf-stable and lasting for years would be thrown out.

I wished I could say that was the last time I had eaten from a dumpster. But even shivering from sweats, covered in my own filth and sick, I knew I’d be back to it if I survived, at least until I found something to pay me. Even crawling through parking lots to get to them, I still kept going to job interviews when I could, just like every other cast-off, forgotten, lost soul who shared those overpasses with me.

Jackdaw watched me with a suddenly knife-sharp focus. The blade of it scoured down my body as if she was seeing me for the first time. What would she see? Would she see the same threads I saw on her? Were those how Fae recognized each other when faces and names changed like underwear? Or would she see something else? I wished I trusted her enough to ask. Trusted myself enough not to give away who we really were or, more importantly, who I really was.

“Bread it is then. Got some berries in a basket behind you if those are of interest. The milúll tree, a few hours’ walk from here, is putting off the blood crop right now, so I don’t have any of those to share. And the cellar is out too.” Her voice was holding back those suspicions, that desire to ask more to pry up the layers of armor I had cloaked myself in and find the juicy bits beneath that I was hiding.

“Blood crop?”

Brittle Spear snorted as Jackdaw was kind enough to set what looked like yesterday’s bread onto a plate, along with some of the berries. “A blood crop is what they call it when the milúll trees weep their nectar instead of building fruit. Doesn’t happen every season, but occasionally the trees will drip a sticky syrup, the same color as the fruit, instead of turning the buds into immature fruits. They say that it happens when a Fae loses their anam cara. Or finds one. Can’t rightly remember. Or it might be when the gods cry. Or when they fuck.”

“Useful. Real useful.” I didn’t mention the way Brittle Spear adjusted his manner of speaking with Jackdaw close enough to hear him.

“It’s none of those. Happens when the tides of magic are ebbing.” Jackdaw put in, taking her seat with her back to the fire again. “Any good farmer knows that. It’s nothing about love-sick Fae or horny gods. It’s just the ebb and flow of magic. Magic’s like water, tides come in, tides go out. The blood crops start in the large orchards, and at their peak, when magic’s holding its breath just before it starts rolling back in, the smaller orchards tended only by one or two farmers and only one or two spiders, they’ll start it too. Milúll only ripen when magic’s at its peak in its tidal cycle.”

And just like that, the suspicion was gone. Covered up by the simple sharing of what she deemed to be elementary agrarian knowledge. There was something oddly satisfying about the explanation. Brittle Spear’s was tied up in the mystical. It made this place seem less like the nightmare it actually was and more like a fever dream. Jackdaw’s explanation was logical, if a bit strange. It was measurable and solid. Magic wasn’t this unknowable force that so many of the Fae at the palace would have the humans think it was—it was something tangible. It was gravity by another name. Different but the same steadiness and reliability.

That it was broken, unreliable, and dangerous now seemed even more of an affront to the natural order of things. My mother’s insistent pleas for me to balance it felt more pressing. She would know, she would understand magic better than anyone else living, the last and closest ally to the dead God of Magic. What mysteries and knowledge had she taken to the crystalline grave I put her in?

I once again wished I had had more time with her as I nibbled along the edges of the chilled bread.

Chapter 30

Cricket

Jackdaw was a good host. She kept our bowls full until our bellies were too and shared what little she had in the way of blankets—tucking each of us into our own shack, even though Green Man and Emerald chose to share theirs. She even supplied us with what probably amounted to a week’s worth of chopped wood to fuel the fires in the small cottages. It staved off the cold and settled our minds to know the haunts of the open woods wouldn’t venture into the shacks. We would be safe from them if we did not wander around in the dark once the moon came up as the teeth and claws got even more hungry at that time.

I lay awake, separated from Brittle Spear, whose shack was next to mine, my eyes staring into the blackness gathered around the ceiling of my welcomed little hovel, where the warm orange light of my fire could not reach. I longed to see the opaline stars again. It felt uncomfortable to sleep with layers of wood and peat between them and me. I had spent months without seeing a single one winking down, and now, in the still silence, all I could do was think about their watchful eyes quietly standing sentinel over me in my sleep.

I’d expected to hear the whines, cries, and wails off in the distance of the small cluster of ramshackle buildings as we slept. It was all we heard every night after all, the lack of them was almost as disturbing as the first time we had heard them. It was completely silent here—just the occasional crackle and pop of the fire as it contentedly chewed on the logs. My ears strained to hear anything, to catch a whisper of even a bug rustling in the thick thatched grasses that clung to the roof.

And yet there was nothing.

I closed my eyes and took deep breaths, reaching out to the threads that swirled around me and filled the sparkling air as we had walked through meadow, field, and woods. There, among the blanket that lay over the cabin, the threads, thrummed and hummed with gentle, calm, at-ease heartbeats. They were soft. Muffled like I was hearing them echo in my mind from behind thick walls of cotton. I focused on them, followed the imaginary slivers of filament that connected us until I felt the pulse thud thick in my chest. One of them shivered, and then a tiny tinkling giggle slipped down the thread to chase after me, as if seeking me out.

“Hello, friend,” it whispered and then was muffled by the cotton again.

I shot up from the hard-packed dirt floor and threw the door open. The voice had come crystal clear as if standing right outside the door.

And yet there was nothing. No small child who would have owned that voice stood outside. It was dark. Only the gloomy warmth of Jackdaw’s lanterns was fighting back the misty night fog rolling through the cluster of buildings. Even the moon hid its face behind a cloud, suffocating the night in inky darkness.

“You’re very pretty.” The voice came again. It could be no more than two feet away. The heartbeat was louder now, not as loud as my own racing beat but as loud as if I had laid my head on the owner’s arm to use as a pillow.

I stepped out into the night, cautious and guarded for the specters haunting the woods that Jackdaw had warned us of. My gaze darted to every creeping shadow and every hidden place where anything larger than my fist could hide. Aside from a tuft of grass that swayed to its own music in rebellion of the silence, there was nothing out of the ordinary, nothing different than it had been in the afternoon when we found it.

I was losing my mind. That must be it. I was losing my fucking shit. It had only taken who knows how many months in lunatic land to toss my marbles into the same pit as theirs, but it had finally happened. I was hearing fucking voices now. Disembodied fucking voices.

“Did it have to be a kid? I mean, c’mon, how cliche,” I mumbled to myself, turning to shut out the madness and hunker down in my thin blanket.

“Don’t you like kids?” the child’s voice asked.

I spun around just as the moon slipped free of the mist. Where its silvery fingers touched, a mirage bled into existence. Where once there had been just five buildings, nearly falling apart and with more splinters than boards, now a warm country village stood behind them as if the buildings I had seen were just a hollow movie set. Amber lights hung from what could almost be streetlamps, bathing the scene in a homey, buttery light. Fae, humans, Far Darrig, and all manner of other creatures I had never seen before except in fairytales milled about. There were not droves of them, maybe twenty or thirty, just enough to people a small village but not enough to be a city. None of them looked haggard; none of them walked with fear riding their spines. None of them seemed uncomfortable around the others.