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Years later, I would hear his voice again. After my sisters and I had returned from trespassing into the Solitary wild, we’d convened at midnight, hunkering in the wagon by our home. The vehicle had been our playhouse since childhood, a place for telling stories and engaging in make-believe.

We’d been discussing what to do if the Faeries exacted retribution on us. Afterward, we’d recited a Fable. But in the midst of the recitation, Lark and Cove had disappeared—simply evaporated.

Paralyzed, I had blinked through my spectacles. Then I’d frowned with suspicion. Marching outside the caravan, I’d met a howling wind rushing through the property. I’d tracked the current to the willow tree hovering over the wagon and called out my sisters’ names, but they hadn’t answered.

No. He had instead.

“Tsk, tsk,” his tenor heckled from someplace in the branches. “With a voice like that, you’ll burn down the wild.”

I tensed, scowled. “Who’s there?”

“Me.”

“Me, who?”

No reply. Suffice it so say, I had anticipated he was a Fae, but I hadn’t known it washim. Not at the time. I couldn’t have deduced his identity because only a bulky shadow had permeated the trees, lounging across the branch yet dissolving whenever I shuffled near.

Also, that voice had grown nine years older, nine years broader, and nine years huskier. In that moment, it had been unrecognizable.

I had insisted to know who he was, and he’d sang, “You’ll find out.”

I had insisted to know where my sisters were, and he’d drawled, “Ask them later.”

I had insisted to know what he wanted, and he’d baited, “To antagonize you. And to see what you look like. And to tell you, it’s time to play. So be ready.” A smile had shimmied through his words. “Be very, merrily ready.”

I had been about to ask more, but he’d cut me off with, “By the way, luv. Your spectacles are lopsided.”

Astonishment had brought me up short. I’d forgotten about my reading lenses, which accounted for my stunted vision. I had yanked them off, and the world sharpened into blades of color. But he was gone.

And then I’d heard my sisters yelling for me, as if I had been sleepwalking or imagining things. Yet I hadn’t been dreaming or hallucinating. The encounter had been real.

The next evening, I received the first missive summoning me to Faerie. It had been delivered by a deer, glamoured to resemble a mortal one. In that moment, a sidebar of facts had occurred to me, far too late.

One, calling out for my sisters must have provided the Faeries with our names. How else would they know to address the envelopes?

Two, the stranger in the tree hadn’t been a stranger at all.

Three, only one voice has ever called me “luv.”

15

My eyes crack open. I find myself cocooned against a masculine form, my head tucked in his lap. We lie on our sides, inverted from one another and curled in like snail shells. His cheek rests on my calves, his arm flopping over my knees.

Bleary, I hypothesize whether this is a deranged figment of my imagination. But when I glimpse Puck’s unconscious face mashed atop my limbs, reality jolts me upright. His head smacks into the dirt, a husky curse puffing from his mouth.

Puck deduces our position and gives a start. He sits up, unintentionally flanking his limbs around me in the process.

My thoughts are still cottony from the memory of our past and the slumber it must have elicited. That’s the only justification for why I don’t skid away from him. Puck is sluggish, his groan thick and rumpled—an intimate noise that further incapacitates me.

What’s the meaning of this? How did he end up on my side of the pit?

“I have an excuse,” Puck vouches while scratching the side of his head. “You were shivering in your sleep, and I was too sapped to think straight.”

He must have crawled over, intending to provide body heat. In short, he’d misinterpreted. This forest has a moderate climate, and I’m wearing my cloak, so I hadn’t been cold. That’s not why I’d been shivering.

“That’s what mortals do,” I yawn. “They twitch when they’re dreaming.”

This gives him pause. As he inspects my proximity anew, I become acutely aware of his upturned thighs lining my own, the wall of his torso flush with my back.