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Am I gawking? I’ll take his word for it.

I think of my adopted sisters, who are the same age as me—each of us nineteen and only several months apart. Lark is the youngest, I’m the middle child, and Cove is the eldest.

I think of how we became a family despite having different bloodlines, different backgrounds, different everything. I think of how Papa Thorne gave us a home and became our father, and how they all became my lifelines.

I think of how my sisters and I can predict one another’s sentences, how we bicker one moment, then clasp each other in hugs the next. I think of us sitting around our papa’s chair while he recites Fables to us, though most times I’ve had to correct his narration.

I think of my sisters scouring the woods with me to rescue animals, including orphaned or injured creatures and victims of trade poaching. I think of my family sharing that passion, working side by side, running the Fable Dusk Sanctuary together. I think of our connection, our unbreakable bond.

Then I think of what Puck had just said. The protectiveness in his words. The threat he’d issued. It’s the warning of one who won’t stand to hear his kin insulted.

I contemplate how many times I’ve voiced that same threat to other people when they snubbed or offended Lark or Cove, and how my sisters have done the same for me.

“Huh,” Puck says. “I must have revealed something profound. Or are you finally learning to appreciate my robust physique? You know, they say Cerulean is the sexy-pretty one, Elixir is the violently beautiful one, and I’m the ruggedly handsome one. What say you, mortal?”

Oh, the reply this deserves. Yet all I can concentrate on is what he’d stated before that. “I didn’t know they were your brothers.”

“By loyalty, not bloodlines. We’re brothers of history and brothers-in-arms.” The satyr’s expression hardens. “Sharing a dark past tends to link people that way.”

The Trapping festers between us. However, I leave that memory where it is, refusing to pick it up. It’s too heavy, and this chamber is too small.

It’s bad enough I have to share space with this villain. If I believed in destiny, I would say fate has a malevolent sense of humor.

“Boy oh, boy,” Puck sneers. “Such reserve. Such willpower. If this subject doesn’t chop through that scowl of yours, I’ve got no idea what will. You’ve been graced with a smoky voice, yet you squander it on lectures and quotes that don’t belong to you. What exactly are you passionate about, enough to speak from the pit of your stomach? Enough to shout yourself hoarse? Have you ever screeched? Sobbed? Moaned? Cried out?”

I just did when he fixed my shoulder!

“And your shoulder doesn’t count,” he censures.

“You wish to know my opinions outside of a book?” I snap. “You wish to know what incites me? You and your brothers don’t have the monopoly on suffering. My sisters and I grew up as foundlings, toiling on the streets to survive.”

Puck’s eyebrows crinkle, but I keep talking, keep speaking. “Though that’s not what makes us a force to be reckoned with. It’s what we learned from it and who we became afterward. Lots of people develop a bond from mutual turmoil, including my neighbors—the villagers, farmers, and tradesfolk you’ve terrorized, abused, and indentured since the dawn of time. In short, shared trauma didn’t write your brotherhood into the history books.” Animosity spews from my lips. “Your actions afterward did.”

Puck peers at me in uncanny silence. Because we’d spent a limited number of nights together as children, he doesn’t know the particulars of my past. Back then, I never told him about Lark, Cove, or Papa Thorne, just as I never told him about the prequel to those years: my upbringing as a trade poacher.

“You were foundlings?” he asks. “You’re not blood-related?”

“Yes,” I answer to the first question. “And no,” I answer to the second. “Nor do we need to be linked by birth. In my life, the people I share blood with don’t matter as much as the people I’d die for. Those are the important ones.They’remy family.”

The Fae stares at me, fixated. With his irises gleaming in the dark, I might go so far as to call him inspired, as if he’d never considered this before, as if he wants this to be true. I think back to The Redwoods of Exile when I’d asked what he could possibly know about family, and I recall his venomous reaction to that.

What’s his origin? Other than brothers-in-arms, does he have an actual family? And why is he peering at me like I’m a figment?

I’ve never been on the receiving end of such an invasive look. I don’t know what to do with the rest of this moment. Males gawk at Lark this way. They don’t consider me in any way, and certainly not because of something I’ve said.

Puck isn’t one of those males. Regardless, he’s about to open his mouth and spoil the companionable silence. “Very well,” I say. “I won’t call your brothers demons.”

That extinguishes whatever private thoughts he’d been entertaining. “Excellent,” Puck says. “Back to your questions.”

“What has become of my sisters?”

“Ask Cerulean and Elixir, not me.”

“Fine, so who rules which landscape? What games are my sisters playing? Do they have as long as I do to win?”

“And that’s more than three questions.”

“I know,” I say. “I can count.”