“Shut up!” she shouts, lifting her hand to ward me off.

Frustration flares. I want to scream at her. I want to shake her. I bite my tongue and fist my hands to make myself stop.

“Okay,” I say, taking a deep breath. “This is happening fast, I know. But I really do want to help you. I can get you out of Faerie. Tonight.”

The girl is shaking her head again. “I don’t know,” she says. “I don’t know. I was at Burning Man, and there was this guy who said he had this gig passing hors d’oeuvres for a rich weirdo in one of the air-conditioned tents. Just don’t take anything, he told me. If you do, you’ll have to serve me for a thousand years. …”

Her voice trails off, but now I see how she was trapped. It must have sounded like he was making a joke. She must have laughed, and he must have smiled. And then, whether she ate a single shrimp puff or pocketed some of the silverware—it would all be the same.

“It’s okay,” I say nonsensically. “It’s going to be okay.”

She looks at me and seems to see me for the first time, takes in that I am dressed like her, like a servant, but that there’s something off about me. “Who are you? What is this place? What happened to us?”

I asked for her name, so I guess I should give her mine. “I’m Jude. I grew up here. One of my sisters, she can take you over the sea to the human town near here. From there, you can call someone to get you or you can go to the police and they’ll find your people. This is almost over.”

Sophie takes this in. “Is this some kind of—what happened? I remember things, impossible things. And I wanted. No, I couldn’t have wanted …”

Her voice trails off, and I don’t know what to say. I cannot guess the end of her sentence.

“Please, just tell me this isn’t real. I don’t think I can live with any of this being real.” She’s looking around the forest, as though if she can prove it isn’t magic, then nothing else is, either. Which is stupid. All forests are magic.

“Come on,” I say, because while I don’t like the way she’s talking, there’s no point in lying for the sake of making her feel better. She’s going to have to accept that she’s been trapped in Faerie. It’s not as if I have a boat to take her across the water; all I have are Vivi’s ragwort steeds. “Can you walk a little farther now?” The faster she’s back in the human world, the better.

As I get closer to Madoc’s, I remember my cloak, still bunched up and hidden in a woodpile outside Hollow Hall, and curse myself all over again. Leading Sophie to the stables, I seat her in an empty stall. She slumps on the hay. I think the glimpse of the giant toad undid the last of her trust in me.

“Here we are,” I say with forced cheerfulness. “I’m going inside to get my sister, and I want you to wait right here. Promise me.”

She gives me a terrible look. “I can’t do this. I can’t face this.”

“You have to.” My voice comes out harsher than I intended. I stalk into the house and go up the steps as quickly as I can, hoping against hope that I don’t run into anyone else on the way. I fling open the door to Vivienne’s room without bothering to knock.

Vivi, thankfully, is lying on her bed, writing a letter in green ink with drawings of hearts and stars and faces in the margins. She looks up when I come in, tossing back her hair. “That’s an interesting outfit you’ve got on.”

“I did something really stupid,” I say, out of breath.

That makes her push herself up, sliding off the bed and onto her feet. “What happened?”

“I stole a human girl—a human servant—from Prince Balekin, and I need you to help me get her back to the mortal world before anyone finds out.” As I say this, I realize all over again how ridiculous it was for me to do that—how risky, how foolish. He will just find another human willing to make a bad bargain.

But Vivi doesn’t chide me. “Okay, let me put on my shoes. I thought you were going to tell me you’d killed someone.”

“Why would you think that?” I ask.

She snorts as she searches around for boots. Her eyes meet mine as she does up the laces. “Jude, you keep smiling a pleasant smile in front of Madoc, but all I can see anymore is bared teeth.”

I am not sure what to say to that.

She puts on a long, fur-trimmed green coat with frog clasps. “Where is the girl?”

“In the stables,” I say. “I’ll take you—”

Vivi shakes her head. “Absolutely not. You have to get out of those clothes. Put on a dress and go down to dinner and make sure you act like everything’s normal. If someone comes to question you, tell them you’ve been in your room this whole time.”

“No one saw me!” I say.

Vivi gives me her best fish-eyed look. “No one? You’re sure.”

I think of Cardan, riding up as we made our escape, and of the guards, whom I’d lied to. “Probably no one,” I amend. “No one who noticed anything.” If Cardan had, he would never have let me get away. He would never have given up having that much power over me.

“Yeah, that’s what I thought,” she says, holding up a forbidding, long-fingered hand. “Jude, it isn’t safe.”

“I’m going,” I insist. “The girl’s name is Sophie, and she’s really freaked out—”

Vivi snorts. “I bet.”

“I don’t think she’ll go with you. You look like one of them.” Maybe I am more afraid of my nerve running out than anything else. I worry about the adrenaline ebbing out of my body, leaving me to face the mad thing I have done. But given Sophie’s suspicion of me, I absolutely think that Vivi’s cat eyes would be enough to send her over the edge. “Because you are one of them.”

“Are you telling me in case I forgot?” Vivi asks.

“We’ve got to go,” I say. “And I am coming. We don’t have time to debate this.”

“Come, then,” she says. Together, we go down the stairs, but as we are about to go out the door, she grabs my shoulder. “You can’t save our mother, you know. She’s already dead.”

I feel as though she has slapped me.

“That’s not—”

“Isn’t it?” she demands. “Isn’t that what you’re doing? Tell me this girl isn’t some stand-in for Mom. Some surrogate.”

“I want to help Sophie,” I say, shrugging off her grip. “Just Sophie.”

Outside, the moon is high in the sky, turning the leaves silver. Vivi goes out to pick a bouquet of ragwort stalks. “Fine, then go get this Sophie.”

She is where I left her, hunched in the hay, rocking back and forth and talking softly to herself. I am relieved to see her, relieved she didn’t run off and we weren’t even now tracking her through the forest, relieved that someone from Balekin’s household hadn’t ferreted out her location and hauled her away.

“Okay,” I say with forced cheerfulness. “We’re ready.”

“Yes,” she says, standing up. Her face is tearstained, but she’s no longer crying. She looks like she’s in shock.