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“You shall not go near it. Do you understand me?”

I didn’t have a minute to spare anyway, but the force of his voice practically shoved me from him.

We fell into a frowning contest. For the first time, our eyes really held.

His penetrating gaze caused the acorn of my heart to throb uncomfortably. Only when he looked at me like that did I come close to buckling, feeling restless and maybe a little agonized. That deep stare rattled me.

I broke contact first.

I felt Aire’s gaze retreat, so I peeked again, leery of his profile. He’d turned, dismissing me as he collected a glove from the ground and thrust his fingers into it. “You may go.”

With a nod, I shuffled toward my hat. “I’ll just get—”

I bent over, reaching for the headpiece. He must have remembered it, too, because he’d also leaned down to grab it for me.

Then it happened. In all the fumbling, the sack at my hip must have loosened. At which point, the stick key trembled from the opening and fell. In a blink, his hand caught the object mid-air.

We straightened quickly. I watched, arrested as he furrowed his brows and held the evidence to the moonlight. He turned it this way and that, his eyes narrowing in recognition and shifting to me.

“What is this?” he asked slowly.

“Forest souvenir,” I said, since I’d crafted it from woodland bark.

“Funny, because it resembles a key that very few people know about.” He prowled toward me. “Unless you’re a guard, or the First Knight, or anintruder.”

Punctuating his last word, he swiped the axe from me. He slung the weapon into the birches, out of my reach.

I floundered backward, because dammit. Of course, he would know plenty of the castle’s secret passageways, including what you needed to get into them.

I saw only one way out. He’d thought me a puppet, then a witch. He hadn’t trusted what he’d seen, but he appeared to sense things acutely, reacting to them fiercely.

Time to manipulate that.

Aire’s eyes raked me over, his cloak swatting his legs as he moved. “Where did you get this key?”

I shook my head, not about to confess that it was a replica. The carvings on the stick had been so intricate that creating a twin was near to impossible. At least, for somebody who hadn’t grown up in the home of a master carpenter. But above all, someone who didn’t know the essence of wood.

In my opinion, the former was moot without the latter.

“The shadow surrounding you is flagging,” the knight said. “It seems you’ve suddenly forgotten your tongue.”

“Okay.” I panted through my answer. “I think...you haven’t considered...something as well.”

He raised an eyebrow. “That would be?”

I gave him a wry shrug. “The other axe.”

His face fell. His eyes widened.

Punk took off, bolting from the branches. It caused a racket in the trees, distracting him as I whipped the second axe from my nape.

I rammed the handle into the knight’s abdomen.

If I’d been made of flesh and blood, he wouldn’t have gone down. Not even close. But the element of surprise, my woodskin, and the axe tripled the impact. All of it had been enough to bowl the knight over, sending him to the ground.

I blinked at what I’d done. Then I snapped out of it, dropping over him while tearing the ball of oiled cloth from my hip sack.

“I’m sorry about this,” I said, shoving the cloth against his nose, holding it there until he ceased his thrashing. “Consider me a figment. A dream, all in your head.” Improvising, I whispered,“In the land of falling leaves, there lived a knight...”