Rob had noticed that something was following him. He was currently leading both horses up through the woods to one of the stone circles that dotted the landscape near Celespire. This was the fourth he’d checked out, and he could already tell this was the one he wanted, finally. There were traces of hoofprints, old and faded now, where deer and horses both had trampled through the undergrowth. The only troop that used both kinds of mounts belonged to the fey.

It was getting dark by the time he reached the brow of the hill and saw the stone circle before him.

“Got you,” he said, in satisfaction.

Getting into fairyland had to be easier than sneaking into Celespire at least. He was never doing that again. The Storm King could suck his… Rob saw a shadow moving on the flat plane of the nearest stone, and realised he wasn’t alone. His weapon was in his hand without conscious volition, and he whirled, dropping the leading reign.

His foe proved to be nothing more than a fox, however. It had a russet coat with a white-tipped bushy tail, blacked-tipped ears and black socks. It sat on its haunches, with its brush wrapped neatly around its feet, and looked at him with an inscrutable expression.

Its manner reminded Rob of a cat. He hated fookin’ cats. Give him a dog any day.

He looked around in case the fox was accompanied by an actual person, but no. It appeared to be alone.

“Fook off,” he told the fox, and stamped his foot aggressively at it.

The fox looked down at his boot and then back up at him, as if wondering whether that was the best Rob had got. This fookin’ place really did his nut in sometimes.

If there were weird foxes wandering around, though, that meant Rob had to be in the right place. After waiting a moment, the fox walked off into the undergrowth, in a casual, sauntering sort of way, as if to show that it had chosen to leave of its own accord, and its departure had nothing at all to do with Rob’s threatening behaviour.

“Fook off and don’t come back,” Rob muttered.

The horses were well-trained, and hadn’t gone far. He recovered the leading reign and walked them around the stone circle, looking at the centre of the circle out of the corner of his eye. That was the problem with all this fookin’ fairytale shite. You couldn’t just march up to a fairy door, open it and walk in. There would be some mystical bullshit like walking seven times widdershins and then hopping on one foot in circle and closing one eye and singing a song backwards until you felt like a right pillock, and all the actual fookin’ fairies were probably watching from the other side of the door while killing themselves with laughter.

He marched around the stone circle seven times one way, and seven times another way, until the horses were beginning to get restive, which Rob didn’t blame them for one bit, and if there were any fairy doors left, they firmly refused to open.

It was fully dark now, so there was nothing to do except set up camp.

Not in the centre of the stone circle, of course. He wasn’t an idiot. He set up his campfire, careful to feed it old, dry wood so that it wouldn’t give off smoke, and keeping it low so the light wouldn’t show from a distance.

Game was thin this close to Celespire, because of the storms that regularly swirled around it, and because the Storm King was an arrogant shithead who didn’t care what effect his stupid magic had on everyone else. One day Rob was going to show him the error of his ways, but that was some way off yet.

Rob hadn’t been able to catch anything, but he still had some of the hare he’d caught last night. He threaded the meat efficiently onto a stick and held it over the campfire. It was at times like this that he missed Pepper, his dog. The horses were all well and good, but they weren’t companions like Pepper had been.

After a while, Rob noticed that there were gleaming eyes on the opposite side of his campfire.

It was that bloody fox. It was sitting belly down, with its little black paws out in front of it, and its mouth hanging open in a sort of vulpine grin.

“This is my fookin’ dinner,” Rob said, irritated. “Fook off!”

A few minutes later, the fox was gulping down half the chunks of meat that had been roasting on the stick and Rob was scowling as he ate the rest. He couldn’t help noticing how thin the fox was. Its ribs were showing, and its fur was dull and lank.

Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

It wasn’t his problem and he didn’t care.

Of course, the fox didn’t go away after that. It settled in as close to the fire as it could get without singing its fur, looking like a contented cat. Rob decided he was, in fact, an idiot.

“If you’re still here in the morning…” he began.

“You won’t get in that way, you know,” the fox said.

Rob could see its mouth opening and moving, and its lips wrinkling unnaturally as it uttered words that a fox should never have been able to pronounce.

A fookin’ talking fox! He relieved his feelings by swearing for a minute straight.

“I don’t know most of those words,” the fox said, with interest.

Rob’s mouth shut with a clack.

“Who the bloody hell taught you to speak?” he asked.

The fox gave him a look as if he was being dense.

“I’ve always been able to speak,” it said loftily, in a way which made Rob think it was lying.

“What the fook do you want, anyway?” Rob asked.

“To get back into the fey realm.” The fox shivered suddenly. “This place is cursed.”

It explained that it had gone through the circle from the fey realm out of curiosity some days ago, but hadn’t been able to get back. There was something evasive about its gaze that made Rob think it wasn’t telling the whole truth.

“How the hell are you going to help me?” Rob asked, unimpressed.

The fox looked away. Was that embarrassment?

“I can show you where the door is, and you can open it.”

Rob stared at it grimly.

“You’re fookin’ lying to me,” he said.

“I’m not!” the fox protested.

“Why the hell can’t a fairy creature open the fookin’ door to fairyland?” Rob demanded.

“I'm a fey creature, not a fairy,” the fox said, with dignity.

“I don’t give a shit what you are. Why can’t you open it?”

Either something bad would happen to the person who opened the door, or … the fox had been banished. The more Rob thought about it, the more he liked that explanation. It would explain why the fox was being so evasive. Rob didn’t care about that, though.

“It needs the right person,” the fox said, not meeting his eyes.

“And I’m the right fookin’ person? Bit convenient for you, innit?”

“I’ll owe you a favour,” the fox said, reluctantly. “A door for a door.”

Fey creatures offering favours like that was unheard of. The little wretch must be really desperate to get back into fairyland.

“Show me the door,” Rob ordered, not committing himself.

The fox got to its feet. Rob kicked soil over his campfire, making sure it was properly out, and gathered up his things, then collected the horses. He followed the fox to the stone circle.

“Your mistake was to walk on the outside of the circle,” the fox said over its shoulder. “You need to thread between the stones, to walk the path on the edge of this world and the next.”

Rob followed, keeping his hand tight on his palfrey’s bridle. The horses had assumed they had stopped for the night, and were not pleased to be weaving through stones in the darkness. They had ridden hard to get here, and they deserved a break.

They trod the stones seven times, widdershins. As Rob followed the fox, he noticed that sparks of light were beginning to gather in the centre of the circle, like fireflies. It was working.

The fox rounded the last stone, and led him to the centre of the circle, where the outline of a doorway was forming, a thin crack in the fabric of reality with golden light pouring through.

It was hovering more seven or eight feet off the ground. No wonder the fox couldn’t get back in. It couldn’t reach. Rob let out a crack of laughter that startled the horses, and made the fox flinch.

“You’re too short! That’s why you’re stuck!” he crowed. The fox's ears twitched, and it pointedly turned its head away.

“You need to pull the doorway down so we can walk through,” it said coldly.

“You short-ass!” At six foot two, Rob had been asked by more than one woman to reach for items on the highest shelves in supermarkets. This was the first time he had ever been approached by a fox for the same service.

“Can you catch hold of it or not?” the fox snapped.

"You want me to touch it?" Rob asked sceptically.

"You can use a stick or something if you like," the fox said, indifferently. "Just nothing steel or iron, and particularly not cold-forged iron."

“Alright.” Rob took his quarterstaff from where he'd fastened it to the saddle bags. He reached up and carefully used the staff to press down on the glowing line that formed the edge of the doorway. He could feel the effect of it, even through the staff. It felt cool and hot at the same time, with that weird tingle that magic always gave you, but this was fizzier, like a bottle of bubbly some idiot had shaken up before trying to open.

“Why the fook was it hovering in the air?”

“Because it was tethered to the ground, but the tether gets weaker and it tends to drift away.”

“What did you go through it for in the first place then?”

“I didn’t expect it to happen so quickly,” the fox said sulkily. “They don’t want outlanders marauding through and trying to kill everyone left, right and centre, no offence.”

Rob pulled, and the door slid downwards, until he was looking over a foreign landscape. It was a canyon, with towering cliffs on either side. As soon as the bottom of the doorframe was hovering just above the grass, the fox poked its head through and gave another expressive shiver.

“Oh, it did have to be here,” it said crossly.

Rob noticed that there were a lot of round caves set into the canyon walls, the sorts of holes that might hide ambush predators. Some of them looked nearly six feet wide. Just his luck. It was going to be giant spiders or something like that. Rob hated spiders more than he hated cats.

The fox leaped through the door way and skittered rapidly through the canyon, disappearing out of sight around a rock.

Rob sighed, mounted the war horse, and unslung his blade. Then he clapped his heels to the horse’s sides, and clattered through the doorway into fairyland.

Seriously, fook his life.