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He gives a start, as if this question is old news. “It’s all my kin are talking about.” His voice dampens. “Among other things. Are you sure—”

“I’m fine.”

The satyr deflates and musters a sleep-deprived grin. “So you couldn’t have waited until after I’d made pancakes to disappear? Give it me to truthfully: Is this a delayed reaction? Did you flee the smutty scene because you panicked? All because you’ve been Pucked?”

“I didn’t run away,” I stammer. “The mountain was…and I found out…I have to tell you—”

“Where the fuck have you been?” he bites out. “I’ve been searching for—”

He leans forward to embrace me once more, and I lean forward to explain. But a circle of fungi catches our attention. We freeze, thrust our palms toward each other in halting motions, and blurt out in unison, “Wait!”

The circle loops around me, separating us by inches. Puck hadn’t crossed over, but he could have. While hugging me to him, he could have made that mistake.

Horror drains his complexion. From certain angles, the fungi vanish and reappear, camouflaged into the landscape like an invisible snare. Hunters we might be, but these diminutive caps had hidden themselves well.

I recall this part now. Before losing consciousness, I’d raced through these tube trees and keeled over, sick and vomiting. When I noticed the mushrooms, I’d barely had time to register the consequences before darkness overtook me.

That’s why Puck looks the way he does. That’s why he’d asked me where I’ve been.

Terror lodges itself in my throat as I meet Puck’s gaze, which has transformed from shock to wrath. “Fuck,” he spits.

“Puck?” I croak. “How long have I been asleep?”

The muscles of his face twitch. “Three days.”

But it’s the wrong question. “What about on your side of the ring?”

He mutters another oath. “Three weeks.”

“Three weeks?” Hysteria pitches my voice high. “How could I have been asleep for three days and lost for three weeks? What about Lark? What about Cove? What about the bargain? You’re a hunter! How could it have taken you this long to find me?!”

“Fae rings are Fae rings because they don’t want to be found. And if they don’t want to be found, good luck identifying them quickly unless you’re already trapped,” he says. “I woke up during that chaos in the mountain, and you were fucking gone. Your cloak and supplies were still in my cabin, so I knew something was wrong, but when I caught up with Sylvan, we couldn’t locate you. Juniper.” He draws out my name. “These rings don’t grow just anywhere.”

He stalls in awareness, then mock-sighs. “Shit.”

A saw-edged dagger appears in my periphery, the hilt attached to a groomed hand. I know how Puck would have finished his sentence. The Fables’ appendices invalidate an old belief that Fae rings burgeon when the Folk dance. The truth is, Fae rings don’t grow like that.

“They’re planted,” a feminine voice says.

Foxglove must have recovered the dagger I’d taken from her. She brandishes it while her clan slinks from the trees, hemmed in by a fleet of woodland Faeries. Leprechauns, dryads, fauns, satyrs, brownies, centaurs, and nymphs stalk forward. They close in, wielding their bows, staffs, hammers, axes, blades, and throwing stars. Tinder stands among them, too.

I recall the stares Puck and I have gotten since The Middle Moon Feast. Cypress had warned me that Faeries see many things.

They know about us. We’d been so careful, so tactful. Still, they know. They know their ruler has betrayed them.

Foxglove confiscates Puck’s longbow and quiver, tossing the items to a faun with goat horns. “Get up, gorgeous,” the nymph says to Puck.

He puffs out an inconvenienced breath. “And just who the fuck invited you?”

“I said, get up.”

He complies with a lazy air, swaggering to his hooves. He exhales dramatically—then whips into motion. In a flash of arms and limbs, he twists, ducks, and rams his fist into an encroaching dryad.

Faeries spring into the fray. Puck whirls around the nymph, yanking her arms behind her and swiping the female’s blade, then vaulting it toward a leprechaun who grunts and goes down, his shoulder spraying blood.

I jerk, reaching for my crossbow on instinct and coming up short. Like a dimwit, I hadn’t brought it with me.

Veering, Puck snatches his longbow from the faun and shoots, his arrow pinning a fellow satyr’s hand to a tree. As the Fae howls, Puck rotates and tumbles, loosing a series of arrows with each turn.