I rolled away, wide awake. Her eyes were black with orange specters in the dim firelight, surprised but not alarmed. “Friends?” she said, with a bit of a pout.

“Knackered,” I replied. “Perhaps just a cuddle, for warmth. And put your frock back on, love. A fresh young thing like yourself, defenseless before my wisdom and charm, well, I would not take advantage, it would be unseemly.”

“I am nine hundred years old, sprout.”

“You are not.”

“I am.”

“Elf!” cried the puppet Jones.

“You said there were no elves here,” said I.

“There are no elves,” she said.

“Liar!” said the puppet Jones.

“Fuckload of fairies,” she said, “but no elves.”

“You’re a fairy?”

“Aye, since the blossom first opened to reveal me curled inside it.”

“A fucking fairy?”

“Well no need to be a knob about it, one can’t control the calamity of birth. Do I disparage your people for their dribbling giants and twatty talking puppets?”

“And you’re nine hundred years old?”

“And thus well prepared for your wisdom and charm,” she said with a grin, reaching for my man tackle.

“Thou lecherous crone!” I rolled away from her, pointing my bits toward the night and fire. “I’ve barely a score and a half of summers on my back and yet you would use me like a public boot scraper by the church door.”

“That’s a completely shit metaphor. I shall use you like the cheese-stinking man-tart that you are.”

“I do not stink of cheese.”

“You are a cheese eater. All your people stink of cheese.”

“And your people don’t eat cheese?”

“My people are of the forest. Where in the forest would we get milk?”

“I don’t know, badgers?”

“Aye, that’d be why there are so few of us. We’ve been undone by milking accidents in pursuit of our insatiable taste for bloody badger cheese.”

“Possibly, fairies are not my milieu,” I said, thinking to baffle her with a bit of fucking French. “You are my first.”

“Second,” said she. “Or did you think you were invisible and your puppet is talking on his own because of your magical wisdom and charm?”

“The Puck?” I ventured.

“The Puck?” she mocked, making me sound simple and slow to grasp the obvious. “Go to sleep, fool.” She lifted her frock above her head and let it fall over her. “In the forest, it is only common courtesy, you know, to share a friendly tumble with a kind soul who brings you supper.”

I said, “Take heartfelt thanks from this fool true and humble, / But dinner free-given comes not with a tumble.”

“Did you just rhyme at me?”

“Did you like it?”

“No.”

She settled into a spot on her side of the nest. “Sodding cheese eater.”

What fresh curse was this fierce, feral creature of wit?

“Good night, sweet hag.”

Chapter 5

I Am Slain!

When I awoke Cobweb was gone. A pile of nut meats and berries big enough to fill a yeoman’s helmet waited by the opening of the nest on a trencher fashioned from a large leaf. I resisted the urge to curse the fickle fucking fairy for abandoning me, for she had left breakfast and I was ravenous. She’d left me another waterskin as well and I drank deeply until the chill shuddered down my belly and made a shy turtle of my willy. My boots and motley stood propped on sticks before the smoldering bones of the fire, the salt stains and much of the soil and grit washed away, no doubt in the same stream where she’d filled the waterskin.

I dressed and sat down by the fire to eat my breakfast and plan my next move. On to the city, to be sure, but now that I was not dead, nor invisible, I would need to be careful. Blacktooth and his watch would be looking for me, and my having dirked his leftenant in the ham would not help in making my case for Drool’s release. No, I would have to find my way to the gendarmerie and see if I might free Drool by way of stealth, trickery, and cunning, the tools I’d learned as a cutpurse, and, failing those, subterfuge, guile, and duplicity, the skills I’d acquired at court.

I finished the fairy’s fare. What forest magic she had employed to shell so many nuts in the night without waking me, I could not say, but for the first time in a week my gut unknotted and I could turn my attention to other tasks undistracted. But which way was west and the city? The sun lay well below the forest’s canopy, and I could not remember which side of a tree moss was supposed to grow on, nor why moss was supposed to have a better sense of direction than I in the first place. Then I spotted it, three straight sticks laid out upon the ground in the pattern of an arrow. Good Cobweb, called by her night queen’s horn, had thought to leave me directions. Perhaps I had been too harsh with the haglet for simply succumbing to my prodigious charm.

I slung the waterskin around my shoulder, hitched up my cod, and set off in the direction in which the arrow pointed. I set a stuttering pace, picking my way through the ferns and deadfall until, perhaps after an hour, I encountered a path, where I, at last, felt my sea legs slip away and marched steady and fast until I heard a squirrel-startling scream from ahead.