The fae will often tempt you down long and wending paths

marked by faerie lights and strange flowers.

Do not let them. The end of each path is your death.

On the other side of the door, under the wrong twilight, in the shadow of the impossible floating ruins, I followed the fae who had taken me from you and, in my simmering silence, plotted ways to make him suffer until he’d give me back.

So fixed was I in my hatred of him that I paid little thought to the land around us. (In hindsight I should have; perhaps I’d have consigned it enough to memory that I’d have found my way back out, if that were even possible.) I did not see the door we came through, which shut behind us; I did not turn back to look at the hill from which we’d come, all covered in springy purple heather, whose color was too bright and whose stems were too tall for any heather of our own world. It towered over our heads, and I saw only the shadow of it drowning my own small one as we walked.

For his part, the fae strode across the moor as steadily and easily as if he were a lord taking a stroll around the grounds of his manor. Though the way was laid with stones, and though I nearly tripped twice as we wound our way down the long purple hill, the fae did not even look down. When I stumbled over a broad root - as taut and whitely pale as your face had been when he’d first come to you and asked you for his bride, Aislin - he merely caught me around the waist, so quick I did not even see him till he was right there holding me, and he looked down at me with something between pity and distaste.

But he said nothing, only “We’re nearly there. Come,” and I didn’t know any better than to follow him, as much as some small part of me thought it would be better if I stayed behind and fended for myself, somehow, and likely starved to death (for I was no huntress - not like Eire - and I saw no friendly villages here among the monstrous stalks of heather to shelter me), or tumbled down the side of the gravelly slope until my broken body could tumble no more.

When he said that to me, though, I could not help but wonder: Where exactly did he mean to bring us? For besides the shattered castles in the sky, the twilit expanse was empty of all but wilderness.

He led me down and down, and when I thought there was no further down to go, down more we went still. At the bottom of the hill there was a hidden valley of trees clustered around the remnants of a creek, disguised against the purple of the moor, for their leaves were also violet, as dark as irises. I followed him over the banks of the creek, picked my way through dripping stones, and watched the bob and glint of his antlers, which now lay still and bare, no longer sprouting with any beetle or flower or weed. You could nearly have imagined they were an ordinary deer’s antlers if not for the way they rose right out of the flesh of his skull.

And there, by a weakly trickling spring that fed into this creek, my wicked fae suitor knelt in the water - somehow it did not moisten his knees, even though it flowed right over them and his deerskin, surely another fae trick - and bowed his head over one particular stone carved with a strange rune, and of all things, he knocked.

This was not the knock of a man trying to see if there is water inside a stone, to know if it is good to bring to a fire or if it will split under the heat and send shards flying into his head. This was a proper knock as of a guest at the door of his host’s home, three good steady raps. I was watching with an open mouth when, even stranger, there came an answer.

(Aislin, you may say, Why was this what you could not believe, when you’d already seen him grow flowers out of nothing and wither them without even a touch and take you through your own door into a world that should not be? And I would answer you that mortal hearts work in strange ways, and sometimes it is not until we see the most mundane thing turned upside down that the rest of all the strangeness falls into place for us.)

The answer came thus: “Tell me your name, and I shall let you pass.”

The fae smiled - not a joyful smile, but one wicked and sharp, like the waxing moon on a dark night, like the tip of a blade.

“I am he of many names,” was his reply, “as many as your city bears. Call me twilight and spring, autumn and dawn, he who wears the gloaming like a coat, both master and mistress; I have been called all this and more, for to have my name is to catch water in a sieve.”

I thought this sounded very stupid and arrogant, and the voice in the stone seemed to agree.

“You know that isn’t what I mean.”

“Of course,” said the fae. “But you also know I cannot give you my name, don’t you, Acris oth Inenda? ”

When he pronounced these words a little tremor seemed to run through the air: something like the shiver before lightning strikes close by, or the updraft that accompanies a flame. And though I could see nothing, I felt that whoever was speaking from within - or beyond - that strange stone, they had for a moment recoiled, perhaps in terror.

At last I heard: “All right! All right. But don’t think I won’t get you back one day for this, foolhardy whelp.”

That was spite, not fear. I almost laughed; this cocksure, grinning twig of a man deserved spite, and I’d have piled it on him twofold if not for thinking he didn’t deserve to be graced with my own tongue at the moment. But the fae only grinned wider, and a moment later the stone groaned and then (for it was as tall as two men stacked on top of each other) began to roll back with all the weight of a millstone being turned for the first time in a season.

In its wake the water of the spring did not pour in. It stayed back, the same way it had stayed off of the fae’s own knees. And when the stone had finished rolling - under the bearing of no hands nor backs that I could discern - I saw not the damp hole I’d expected, but a dry, deep passage carved out of more stone, covered in more wild runes, and filled with warm red light.

It was a hall, I understood to my disbelief, that marched straight into the earth.

“Old antler-head,” said the cranky speaker of the stone, “you’re free to come through. But I will haunt you for what you’ve done.”

I still saw nobody speaking - that is, until I looked up and saw a raven perched on a naked root over the mouth of the tunnel. No, not a raven: a very tiny and ugly little man with black feathers covering all of him but his face, and from his back sprouted wings - not a bird’s wings, but a moth’s.

“Ho there, little bird,” said the fae merrily, “your kindness won’t be forgotten. Come, my bride! He’s letting us both in here out of the gentle mercy of his tiny heart - isn’t that right?” (this with a sly glance up at the feathered man, who glowered more fiercely and frighteningly than Father ever had, even when I’d hidden his wooden idols from him).

The bird-man said, “Go, before I change my mind and peck your eyes out.”

“Oh, you wouldn’t,” said my suitor. “You haven’t got claws, not since last time you threatened me like that.”

He said this very sweetly, but I saw the way the tines of his antlers gleamed in the light, and so did the bird-man. The peak of his throat bobbed, and he said nothing, but shifted from foot to foot - which I saw, indeed, were gnarled like a bird’s, but scarred at the tips, as if their nails had been torn from their beds - and grumbled, low in his chest and wordless. (If he too was a faerie - if he noticed the iron still in my hand - he did not chastise me for it. Perhaps he knew I was too weak to really do much with only my fireplace spit, or perhaps he could tell that he was not the one I wanted to hurt.)

The fae glanced back at me and tilted his head. No grand bows this time, but the mocking glint in his eyes was there just the same. “After you, my lady,” he said.

I scoffed. “What do I know might be waiting for me in there? Do you always tell women you’re courting to leap helter skelter into holes in the ground before you, or only when you know they can’t fight back?”

He colored - not the red blush I expected, but an odd shade that mixed gray and blue and green, all across his delicate, pallid cheeks.

“The folk I court are braver than you,” he said simply. But he went first, and I followed, head high, silently proud for knowing I’d made him flinch, even if he tried to pretend otherwise.

(I did not look back at the bird-man at the mouth of the tunnel as I went through. Just the same, I knew he watched me, and I knew he knew I was not of this place, and helpless, too. A good thing he was missing his talons.)

The deeper we went, the warmer it got, and the brighter the glow on the walls grew. Soon enough it felt as if we were standing in a forge. Sweat dripped down the back of my neck and soaked the collar of my dress. I bound up my hair with unsteady fingers, no small task without a mirror or Aislin (sweet Aislin and those clever, sure hands) to help. It was a simple enough style - a thick braid wrapped around my head from front to back, woven into a knot over the knape of my neck - but I still struggled with it, for it was not the sort of thing a lady to be would have done herself, and it grew all the harder when the fae suddenly stopped and held up one slender hand.

“My clever bride,” he said, “which way?”

How was I to know? I craned my head past him (for all that he was thin and brittle as a twig, the way here was so narrow that even he nearly filled it) and saw that we were at a fork, and there were three ways to go: ahead, and to either side. All three led off into sudden darkness, and all three looked equally awful and without meaning to me. (If the runes at the head of this tunnel had even meant anything, I could not read them, and they had faded as we’d walked on anyway.)

The fae was looking at me. His eyes glittered yellow in the half-gloom, and I shuddered. He was hateful.

“Well?”

I said through clenched teeth, “Don’t mock me. And I’m not anything of yours, least of all your bride.”

“You promised your hand to me,” said the fae easily. “And I am not mocking you. I am asking you in truth.”

“I’d take my hand back if I could,” I assured him, which was less a real plea than a way to lash out at him, for I had lost hope by then that I really could withdraw my betrothal any longer; if I could have, surely he’d have done it before, when I’d asked.

His nostrils flared. “As would I, but here we are. So answer me: which way forward? ”

The fae could not lie, but could they joke? I wasn’t sure. I laughed at him incredulously and then, when he only stared back as evenly and unblinkingly as a cat, I threw my hands up. “To the left,” for this was the hand I wrote with, and as good a guess as any. “Is it all the same to you?”

He only smiled mysteriously at that, which made me all the more set on making him hurt dearly later on - whenever I got to friendlier land and had my bearings about me again, which I had to believe would happen eventually.

I thought he might tell me then which was the real way forward, since surely he knew and was keeping it from me and only amusing himself with my foolish answer. But he did not. He took my hand - I yanked it back as if I’d been burned - and he led me down the passage on the left, which was the same carven stone as ever.

He still wasn’t telling me where he was taking me, and I wasn’t in a mood to ask him and get one of his riddles again. Instead, I studied his back (narrow and light brown beneath his deerskin, like the young hunters in summer back home in Avon, when they tanned during long days spent riverside in the sun) and the ripple of muscles that played over it like light across water as he moved, lean and soft on his feet. He was strangely beautiful, that much I had to admit, as dearly as I hated him and all his wiles and wickedness. I decided that when I got my way with him I’d see if I couldn’t pry those lovely antlers from his skull and bring them home; that way I’d have a trophy like the boys who hunted always did, and maybe then at last one of them would marry me, and I’d be out of Avon, if only I could convince my husband to set off for a warmer, richer clime where perhaps the winters weren’t so cruel and the hunting so sparse.

I didn’t really want to marry a hunter, of course. I wanted to marry one of the merchants who came up the river sometimes to ply their wares, who usually sent pages in place of themselves, whose pockets were surely heavy with gold and whose chins were heavy and fat with many good meals beneath them. Father had taught me well to help him with his books in his earlier years, and with that I figured I could catch the eyes of men who had enough gold to need counting and enough savvy to know that the counting was needed. Or, better yet, maybe I’d come across a fair knight riding through our meadows on his way to some castle or other or in pursuit of whatever grand things knights were always after. That I knew was a fairytale, of course; knights were a thing of the past, though not as much of the past as the fae were - or as we’d thought they were, anyway. But still - perhaps there was some dashing captain of the guard, or at least someone of some distinction - or failing that, of wealth - who would happen across our lowly town and raise me by marriage to a greater remnant of what we’d once been.

And what had we once been? I’d been only a little girl when Mother had died, and not much older when, by the end of the same year, Mother’s father - Lord Conamara - had banished us and sent us away to live across the channel. (Father had bundled the three of us in our best clothes and sat us on top of chests of all the things he’d brought to the house - his family’s old heirloom silver, candlesticks and embroidered tablecloths, a tiny portrait of Mother he’d managed to hide from the lord, and of course his box of carven idols - and carried us in his own arms onto the ship that took us there, a big one packed with sheep and crowing boys and ruddy washerwomen and their husbands and babies, right at the chill start of winter, when the sea tossed with whitecaps and turned gray and opaque at the troughs. Avon was the first town kind enough to take us in, and it is there that Father had taken up the job of lighting the wicks each night in their shrines and keeping the fire burning in their hearths and in the temple to the Queen of Ravens, modest work that he knew the villagers gave him only out of mercy for an honest man fallen on hard times, not because they needed it done.)

I’d been young, yes. Still, in her later and sicker years, Mother had seen fit to call me in and sit me on her knee whenever they held dances and soirees, where all the noble ladies and men for leagues around - dressed prettily in lace ruffs and pearl-studded collars, slashed silk sleeves and breeches and mantles and skirts of sapphire and vermillion, viridian and saffron, with nets of gold and silver over their hair - gathered in our great rooms and enjoyed the warmth of our roaring fireplace, as big as five men standing with their arms spread out, which Father himself had showed us along with four of the stable boys, all of them laughing together.

While the men danced, Mother held me in her lap, for she was too tired and thin by those years to dance herself, and told me stories. Sometimes they were stories about the kind of men I hoped to one day marry, who I strained to see reflected among the proud and well-off nobles at the parties we hosted: gallant knights errant and brave kings of old, not unlike Finn himself, whom Mother, like the people of Avon, honored as one of the greatest men in our history. (Though he had never been a king, the people said he was higher than any king we’d had, and so had come the likeness of the Finn’s-crown, which is no crown at all but only the form of a head framed by flowing hair colored white, as Finn’s was. The noblest among men need no crown to be known for what they are.)

Sometimes, though, Mother’s stories were of the faeries. These were not my favorite stories; I would beg her to turn back to the tales of brave and beautiful men instead whenever she started about the fair folk. I said that I would rather dream about the man I’d marry than of ugly, horrible creatures like the fae. In truth, the fae scared me. I did not want to know about things that I could not see, that lurked in the shadows with mouthfuls of teeth, waiting to eat me - or worse, to steal me away and make me their slave forever.

(Would this fae, as unexpectedly beautiful as he was terrible, do that to me? He certainly hadn’t eaten me yet, at least.)

The truth was that I hated Eire because I knew she was of their kind: she was born because Mother had had ways with one of their kind, and so Eire was also of them by blood.

Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

Yes, Aislin, it is true: I’d always been sure the fae had never walked among us since the Wall had been raised. Even so, I had also always been sure that somehow, one of them had crossed the Wall, or perhaps always been stranded on our side of it, and he got to Mother. Why else would she have known so many stories about them when the rest of the manor waved them off as old wives’ tales? Even superstitious Avon had not spoken about faeries the way Mother had. Avon’s people told stories in hushed voices the way you’d tell of ill portents for the harvest - like the gods, distant and perhaps not quite real the same way the sky and ground and wind was, but there and fickle and full of power all the same. But Mother spoke of them like friends.

You had always suspected that Eire was fae-born, I know, but I knew she was. It wasn’t only the stories Mother shared with me about them (eyes sparkling, cheeks glowing, despite the shivering cough in her voice and the pallid drawnness of her face). It was that she often spoke in her stories of one fae in particular - she never gave him the same name, often no name at all, but he was ever a great dark wolf with eyes like pale suns and a pelt like the night itself - and on the night Eire was born, I saw that wolf, just as she’d said he was, out in our garden, standing over Mother’s favorite rosebush, looking into the window where Mother was in labor, unmoving.

This is where the fae said to me, “Again, my bride. Tell me which way.”

I startled out of my thoughts and looked at him like he was mad.

It was dark here; all the glow of before had faded into an event twilight, and in the dimness he looked at me with eyes that glowed green like a cat’s. What little of his face I could see was sour with impatience. “Don’t toy with me this time,” he said. “Just tell me.”

Me toy with him, when he was the one mocking me with strange questions and making a fool out of me? But I sighed and said, “Left,” for I still had no better guess at which way to go, and I could see he would not move until he’d gotten an answer from me.

He made a tight gesture. In the gloom, I could just make out the mouths of four tunnels ahead of us. “Which left? Bright one, I’m beginning to think you aren’t as bright as you look.”

I should have bitten my tongue, I am sure, but I couldn’t help myself. “And yet you must be dimmer still,” I answered him sweetly, “if you know so little that you need to ask me.”

I didn’t mind that there wasn’t enough light to see him color this time; I knew it from the long silence. My claws had struck home, and that I liked very much.

But even so, all he said was, “Very well. The furthest left, then,” and led me down that way, which again seemed no less dry and narrow than any of the rest of what we’d walked, if at least blessedly cooler.

I still couldn’t understand for the life of me why he was asking me to guide us. Did he want us to get lost? I asked him as much and he said nothing, only laughed. This incensed me, and I resolved to say nothing more to him, not even if he asked.

Lucky me: we went on in silence for a long while. This time I felt the air grow cooler the more we walked on, and somehow, though the walls were all the same to me and the ground was even and mostly straight, I felt that we were going down and turning very slowly, perhaps in a great spiral.

Something possessed me to put one hand, my left one, to the wall, as if trailing my fingers along the chill stone would help me remember where I was, even though I’d never been here before and could see nothing. I was not afraid, not exactly, but I hated the feeling of being blind and knowing nothing. But even though the fae was walking in front of me and could hardly have seen me put my hand out, he whirled around as soon as I’d done it and gripped my wrist. “No,” he said, and there was fire in his eyes now (which glowed like embers in the dark, an uncanny orange that no eyes should ever be): not the mocking glint he’d given me before, but real menace, forbidding and bright.

I shook my hand free, and a chill ran through me at the touch of his fingers; they felt as cold and smooth and dry as the stone had. It struck me then that he was truly not at all like the men I’d dreamed of meeting, neither the fat and wealthy merchants nor the handsome knights and soldiers, nor even the noblemen my mother’s father would have wanted me to marry (just as he’d wanted Mother herself to marry one of them, not the poor watchmaker she’d chosen instead). It did not matter that this fae took the face of a man and walked with the legs of one or that he touched me with the hands of one. He was no man, not even close to one, and I was stranded here in a strange dark place, deep underground, with only him for company, at the mercy of him and his terrible magic and the crown of blade-sharp antlers that graced his head.

Then fear did take me. I walked on with him as he bade me do, but now I shivered, though I did not let him see it, and it was not only because of the mounting bone-deep chill. It was because I was afraid of him as I had not been before: no anger to cut the fear this time, only burgeoning panic, my head abuzz with it, my hands clenching at my sides, a cold sweat forming at the nape of my neck. The darkness grew blacker and blacker; little noises skittered and whined in every blind corner. I jumped every time my own hair slithered across the back of my neck. The walls were closing in on me, narrow, too narrow. I could see nothing. If I cried out now, nobody would hear me, I was sure. Avon Town was far, far away.

I decided then and there that I’d rather take my own chances in this gods-forsaken place than stay a moment longer by the side of this wicked beast in the shape of a man. I guessed - hoped - that there’d be another fork in the path, and when we came upon it, when he asked me the way forward again, I’d bolt, and I’d try to outrun him, and if he caught and killed me for it, so be it.

But he did not stop again for a long time, and by the time he did, I was trembling like a leaf in a storm, and still only a little because of the cold, which now caused frost to glitter on the walls and my breath to mist in the air. I was well past fear. I was a bowstring, taut and hair-thin, and all that was in me was the determination to run.

When at last he halted (I nearly ran into his back), my feet ached and my back burned with fatigue. (He still stood unbowed, I thought with gritted teeth, thanks to his monstrous and inhuman nature, surely.) Past his upraised hand I saw that there were now five ways ahead of us. A faint glow suggested three that went up a little, and two on the far sides that went down again. The fae’s rack of wicked antlers nearly filled the whole space here, and I could not get around him without him knowing. But I had to.

He turned to look back at me. “My bride,” he said, “my bright one, tell me: which way shall we take?”

My heart hammered in my chest; my blood roared in my ears. “Let me come forward and see,” I said.

He snorted, but let me duck under his arm and come around him, past those awful sharp antlers of his. Now, whispered the voice of fear in the back of my skull. Now or not at all.

I crooked my finger at him. I said, “Come closer,” and he did. Here, a hand’s breadth from his bare chest, even without touching him, I could feel how hot he was - as hot as the passage had been at the start, as if it were not cold here at all.

I dared not look him in the eye. I stood on tiptoe (for, thin and little as he was, he was still tall) and put my lips to his ear. I said, “I think we’re being followed - by that little man with feathers at the big carved stone.”

He frowned, and I could see he did not believe me. I whispered, “Behind you.”

“No - you’re mistaken,” he said, but even so he turned back to look, and as he did I kicked him in the shin and then gathered up my skirts and bolted.

I expected him to cry out in rage, but he only gasped, and then I was gone, around the corner - for I’d taken the middle passage without much thinking about it, and it curved sharply rightward as soon as I’d gone a few paces from where I’d left the fae. I didn’t glance back as I ran. I wanted to, but I could not. My fear knew better than that.

I ran and ran (my breath like knives in my lungs, for the cold was savage here, and I was not used to galloping about like Eire was; I was a lady, meant for sitting and waiting). As I ran, the walls seemed to grow faces that stared at me from the corner of my sight. I thought I saw a glowing pair of eyes ahead that melted away and turned dark when I got close. I didn’t dare shy away. I kept running.

Here came a fork in the road; I took the right side and went on, and then there was another fork and another, and still I didn’t stop. The walls echoed with my own footsteps and my jagged breathing. I thought I heard my name on the wind - Niamh, Niamh, it said, why do you flee? Give up, girl; nothing awaits you but bad luck. There was a pain in my side, sharp and persistent. I set my teeth against each other; I kept running.

Now the way ahead was growing lighter, and I saw a flickering light on the walls. That is when I made my mistake. I gave in to the itch in the back of my head and looked over my shoulder - he was not there. My left foot went in front of my right; I yelped and went down, my cheek struck stone, I tasted blood, and my sight flurried with stars.

I didn’t stop there, though. As I tripped, the ground seemed to vanish out from under me (or maybe I just hadn’t seen where it caved in, dark as it was), and I was suddenly sliding. My hands scrabbled helplessly; there were roots, rough and bloodying, but not enough to give me purchase. I lost my grip, and then I was falling through utter darkness, down and down.

I was too surprised to cry out. I could not even try to stop myself. This is how I die, I thought as I fell, far from Conamara Hall, covered in dirt, with a strange man having stolen me for his bride, a man who is no man at all. My father does not even know where I am; my father will never know where I’ve died, or how. (That is what broke me, Aislin: we were all he had left, and I didn’t know he’d lost you then, but you by yourself were little enough, and too soft and naive to really care for him, weren’t you?)

Then I was not falling anymore. I was on my back, and I could not breathe.

For a long moment I lay there in silence. I panicked; I tried in vain to get up. But the wind was thoroughly knocked out of me.

I struggled and coughed, weak as a dog. Then, slowly, slowly, in scraps and pieces, my sight came back, and so did sound. There was that light again - flickering like candle-glow on water over the walls - and with it a murmur that became a low roar.

Aislin, I was not alone. Over me crowded a whole host of creatures: most of them hideous, none of them mortal men, and all of them chattering things I could not understand at all.

Suddenly my breath was back. I startled upright. I was in a dry little hole filled with gnarled old roots, narrow enough to cramp me nearly in half, even sitting. When I moved, the little monsters around me (the biggest one as tall as a small dog) all fell silent and stared at me, and for a long moment everything was still and quiet - and then a fat drop of blood fell from my head onto my shoulder with a thick, wet splat.

(In the pause I’d counted at least twenty of them. There was one with a beak and horns like a ram's, with eyes pitch-black, absent of whites. There was one with gnarled fingers as long as it was tall, and sky-blue palms, which it held in front of its chest like a prayer. There were hooves and claws and wings, six of them on one beast, feathered. There were diaphanous insect-membranes and beetle shells. The hole I'd fallen into was narrow and low, small enough that my knees scraped the sides, and the little beasts filled the whole of it, wall to wall. I could not help but gawp at them. They gawped right back.)

The one nearest me looked like a rabbit, white-furred and sweet. I looked at her pleadingly, and she looked back, and then, as my blood dripped, she smiled.

She said, “She smells like man.” Her grin was wide; her breath wafted toward me, and it smelled strangely of mint and burning things. I saw then that her mouth was full of scarlet teeth as sharp and numerous as thorns. “My dear,” she said, “tell me - what is your name?”

I stammered out, “I don’t know. I - I have to be on my way. I’m late.”

“Is that so?” said the rabbit. “Can’t spare even a moment for an old friend, can you? How very like your kind. Be done with the pleasantries and give me the iron and ash already, won't you, dear?"

"No," I stumbled. There were roots digging into my back, hard and twisted. "No, of course not. What do you mean?"

"You know what I mean, my girl." The rabbit flicked a delicate ear and said, "You didn't come tumbling down here for a tea party."

"I came here to get my sister," I said, and instantly knew I'd made a mistake.

The rabbit laughed, lovely and crystalline.

"I know your kind can lie," she said, "but I also know when you're doing it. Don't insult me."

And before I could answer, she lunged, which broke the stillness: then they were all flooding over me, howling.

I yelled and twisted back. My hands went instantly to the iron spit - only I didn’t have the spit. I’d dropped it somewhere along the way earlier when I’d fled from the antlered fae, probably. I was helpless.

One of them had already clawed its way up the front of my skirts. It was small, no bigger than a small dog, and as ugly as one, too. I kicked it in the face (which wasn’t much of a face, more a host of gray mushrooms grown around two big black eyes); it yelped and fell back. But then there was another, and another, and Aislin, I was weak; I was ashamed of how weak I was. I hadn’t known how easily I could be overcome until then. They were tiny but so many, and I was nothing against them. I went down kicking with the taste of blood hot and bitter in my mouth. ( This was the fruit of my mistake, and, as awful as it is to admit, in that moment I wished - yearned - to be back in the tunnels with that horrible suitor of mine instead.)

The rabbit-thing was on my face, snapping at my nose and eyes with those awful teeth of hers. I beat her back, but she came writhing up again between my fingers, grinning, grinning. “Think you’re clever, girl, do you?” she yowled, her claws like little needles in my flesh. “Think you could come crashing around the underhill trying to find out our warren, that you’d not get caught - just like your stupid mortal grandfathers, is that right?” She sank her teeth into my cheek, where there was blood already from the oozing cut on my scalp. I yelped. Two little wood-creatures were clawing at my leg, tearing viciously with sharp twig-fingers. At my neck, something cold and heavy slithered up and grew tight.

The flickering glow on the walls seemed to shift just then; maybe it was my vision growing dark with panic and the growing weight at my throat, but then I heard it, too, like the beating of countless wings. A strong scent of copper, of burning, filled the air. The walls were swelling, moving in. And then I saw they were not walls at all. They were a hundred thousand gray moths who had blanketed the lair around me so thickly, they were walls themselves.

They all rose into the air at once and swirled around me, and through the growing spots that swam before my eyes I saw light flood in behind them. The rabbit-thing shrieked and tried to throw herself down my bodice, but was pulled back struggling and writhing: I saw a carpet of moths plastered along her back, and as I watched I saw her fur come away in lovely white clumps, and then her naked flesh seemed to begin to bubble and froth and grow riddled with holes. But it was not froth; it was the hundred tiny chewing mouths of the moths that were carrying her off of me, and she was moaning and her black eyes were rolling back, bloodshot, into her head.

The rest of the creatures that had thrown themselves onto me were crying out too, overcome by waves of relentless moths. Their pelts and growths and horns were coming bloodily undone under a thousand moth-maws the same way the rabbit’s had. I could only watch. I was too tired and too stunned and too grateful to be horrified.

Just when I wondered if the moths were going to take me, too (just as I was beginning to make peace with it), the cloud of them suddenly darkened and came together. There was a ripple, a shiver like rain from a heavy bough, and then the fae - my fae, with those terrible antlers and ember-bright eyes - shrugged himself into form, the deerskin settling over his shoulders like snow, the last of the moths melting into his shape like shadows under trees.

He did not stop to bother with the creatures, or what was left with them. He strode toward me in two quick steps, and his arms spread wide. “Ah. My bride,” he said, eyes sparkling, mouth twitching as if he were about to smile. “You’re quicker than I believed you’d be! I might never have caught you - lucky me to find you snared here.” Before I could protest, he knelt and caught my chin in his hand, turning it this way and that with the frown of a doctor. “You’re bleeding,” he said. “That isn’t good, so I’ve heard. Whatever did you do?”

“Got free of you,” I wheezed.

He clucked his tongue. “You shouldn’t have tried,” he said. “You nearly met your end wandering around by yourself.”

I pushed him away. “You never should have brought me here. You knew this place was deadly.”

He did grin then, only the littlest bit, tilting his head so that his antlers caught the still-flickering light. That stench of burning still hung strong in the air. “Oh, bright one, my clever girl,” he said, “you know I’d never put my bride in danger.”

Fae could not lie, I reminded myself, gritting my teeth. But whatever he was telling me, it surely wasn’t the whole truth.

It didn’t matter. I said, “How can I get out of here? I want to go back.”

“But you want to save your sister, don’t you?” he said. “Isn’t that why you promised your hand to me in the first place?”

Aislin, I wanted to cry, I want to see Aislin, it’s Aislin I sought to save. But I would not let him know a second time how weak I was over you. By sister he meant Eire anyway, of course, for Eire was the sister he’d promised to trade me for in the first place. (Now that I knew I could not go back and see you, Aislin, now that you were out of harm’s way - out of his way - I didn’t care to be traded at all.)

“My sister isn’t down here,” I said instead, though in truth I didn’t know that at all; for all I knew Eire had been buried already.

“No,” he agreed, which was somehow a relief to know. “But if we are to find her, we must get passage to the court where my brother is keeping her first, and we’ll find that here.”

“In a hole full of roots and dirt?”

He laughed - a genuinely lovely sound, like coins tossed against each other. “No, silly girl,” he said, and helped me up. “ Here.”

He turned to a narrow sliver between the roots and the stone walls that I hadn’t seen before, and here the flickering light spilled through from beyond. He ducked through and tossed his antlers once, twice - the roots were sliced to tatters and fell away; loose earth and rocks fell, too, and the crack widened. In his wake I followed (stepping around the broken bodies of the things that had tried to kill me, willing myself not to look down, nor to think of all the ravenous gray moths he’d been), and from behind him I saw where the flickering light had come from.

This was as impossible as anything I’d seen today, and for that it should have been perfectly ordinary. Somehow it was the wildest thing I’d seen yet. Before me sprawled a city - a whole city, a thousand soaring parapets and spires, cupolas and walls, winding streets and marching stairs; but where cities I knew were built from wood and brick and tile, this was carven all from rock, from the bedrock itself, rising up from the ground as a single great piece. And over it spread a second city perfectly mirrored, also of rock, inverted towers and halls, stalactites to stalagmites - for we were on the precipice of a cavern, and there was no sky but a distant, shadowed ceiling buttressed by huge columns of dripping stone, soaring upward into darkness. And it was all lit by a false sun, and within its carven stone walls the noise like rushing water had become a roar.

Don’t misunderstand me, Aislin - I mean a real false sun burning overhead, a sickly ember orange that our sun never would have been, the color of the fae’s eyes when he’d threatened me before. But that sun was mostly crowded out by an incredible mass of roots: roots so big they were each a castle unto themselves, snarling the doubled city both top and bottom, wrapping up and down the avenues and caging the false sun in thick and gnarled bars. I had never seen trees a tenth as tall or brawny as each of the smallest of these roots were.

And the roar came from the people in the city, for the city spilled with them, as small as ants from up here, but still loud, louder than any city I’d ever heard - the noise of it made tenfold greater by the echoing of the vast and endless cavern.

I could say nothing at all, for once - I, silver-tongued Niamh. I was speechless. I looked at the fae, and he looked back at me with a smile and a gleam in his eyes that I knew meant trouble.

“Now,” he said, “you must see why I asked you to guide me earlier, fool girl. It is because you know nothing of the lands underhill that you - only you, and not I - could lead us. Only someone truly lost can find this place - you really don’t have any clue where we are, do you?”

“I don’t understand,” I said helplessly.

“Oh, bright one, it’s simple!" He spread his arms wide; his eyes shone brighter even than the sun. “Here lies the beating heart of the underhill, where all that is lost is found. Welcome, my love, to the City of a Thousand Names.”