her shoulder blades finally cracked. She then crouched over the riverbank, scooping up an icy handful and bringing it to her lips. She gulped the spring water gratefully.
A twig crunched somewhere to her left. Lilac stood and whipped around so quickly that spots danced before her eyes. It wasn’t dark enough yet that she required her lantern, and she didn’t want to draw unwanted attention to herself. But she couldn’t quite make out what was moving between the trees. Something was there, though; barely audible, the twigs and leaves continued to rustle as if bearing the weight of someone—or something. She frantically scanned the darkness.
She recalled once reading about certain plants native to the Low Forest, memory tampering fruit and hallucinogenic mushrooms, whose seed and spore the Fae would purposefully sprinkle closer to human territory. Such vegetation was illegal to harvest and produce, but as Lorietta had mentioned, the inhabitants of Brocéliande played by their own rules.
Everything she’d consumed and drank as of late had been prepared by the kindred witch, so that made the possibility of poisoning unlikely; however, it wasn’t exactly something she’d put past Garin. Her throat tightened.
The harder she peered, the clearer the sounds grew, almost as if from behind a thick curtain that slowly opened. There was something else this time. Music. Pleasant flute music, and layered beneath that… Lighthearted chatter. Laughter, even. Suppressing a violent shudder, she clenched her fists and advanced through the perimeter of trees. There, she found herself at the mouth of a small clearing.
The chatter and flute music ceased abruptly. Had it all been a figment of her overactive imagination? Of her overtiredness?
Lilac froze, realizing she’d been lured away from the river—and her potato sack. And her belt, which held the dagger.
She scrambled back against a moss-covered trunk at the edge of the clearing. Should she run back to her belongings and her dagger? Or would her sudden movement attract the now-silent source of the voices? Lilac rubbed her eyes.
She was losing it.
Her heart nearly stopped when two distinct voices echoed out of the air right before her.
“Can she—can she see us?”
“Shut your mouth, Ra’arak,” the second voice rasped. It was deeper, rougher than the first.
“The ward, maybe it’s broken.”
“I swear to Jotuun, Ra’arak,” snapped the second voice.
“Cute little thing, she is, aye?”
That was enough. By their voices, she could tell they were obviously Darklings; interacting would only give her away. But, in the moment, being unable to see them was somehow even more unnerving than revealing her identity.
“Show yourselves,” she commanded, eyeing the empty clearing warily.
The moment she addressed the floating voices, a burst of warm air exploded, scattering the dirt and forest debris toward her. Lilac cried out and barely shielded her face in time. Shaking, she dusted her arms off and opened her eyes.
It was as if she’d been transported to another area of the forest entirely.
A handful of colorful patchwork tents barely taller than Lilac encircled a towering bonfire at the center of the clearing. The fire pit had been dug exceptionally deep, and was still lined with a wall of river rocks, probably meant to both shield the flames from the biting breeze and prevent them from catching onto the too-close tents. It appeared the tents had been fashioned out of different garments—clothes, underwear, sheets—sewn crudely together.
Four korrigans sat on logs between the tents and hearth, staring dumbfoundedly in her direction. Two more stood right in front of her, their jaws hanging. Their eyes came level to her breasts; she pretended to sniffle in the cold and crossed her arms across her chest.
“The ward,” the korrigan on the right, the rough-voiced one, said. “It’s gone…”A pair of round spectacles bounced above his grey, bulbous nose every time he spoke.
“I—I apologize,” Lilac stammered. “I didn’t… I heard footsteps and voices, and followed them. I didn’t mean to—”
“You heard us, through the ward,” he repeated, half to himself as the korrigan next to him trembled in silence. “Yes. Yes, yes, yes. And no. No need for apologies, we are able to conjure the ward all over again—it’s simple, all we’ll do is use the bewitched flint to light a fire and we are hidden safely from outsiders. We are only revealed if the flames are extinguished… or if we, the hidden, interact with those from whom we are hiding…” he muttered. Then, he looked up again, peering inquisitively through his spectacles as if seeing her for the first time all over again. “So, erm, how exactly did