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AFTERWARD, AS A reward, Willow was washed and dressed and bundled into a lacquered green carriage shaped like a seedpod, its spoked wheels wrapped in flowering vines that somehow turned without snapping.

It was drawn by two creatures that Willow thought were deer.

Then one of them turned its head, revealing a row of five black eyes stacked like stones.

The creature snorted, and for a breathless moment, Willow heard again the bird’s last ragged gasp in the dark of the pond.

Willow’s tour guide was already seated inside, legs crossed neatly, gloves butter-yellow and spotless. “Ah,” he said, glancing up from a parchment scroll. “Willow Braselton. Right on time. I’m Harrow. I’ll be leading your Hospitality Tour.”

He looked like a man who had never perspired in his life. Silver hair tied at the nape, a waistcoat patterned with constellations, a mouth made for spitting out popcorn kernels.

“Hospitality?” Willow echoed, settling in across from him.

“You’re a guest of the realm,” Harrow said. “Our queen takes hospitality seriously.”

The carriage rattled forward, passing charming cottages with charming gardens where vines curled into trellises shaped like lyres and bells.

In one yard, a pair of giant snails pulled a little boy in a cart.

The boy had golden curls and laughed and laughed, kicking his chubby legs with delight.

He reminded Willow of baby Lark from her vision—baby Lark, who’d been taken from Wrenna and renamed Mercy.

Willow’s mother, prone to migraines and unwilling to fight for anything, even Willow.

Residents paused their sweeping and pruning to bow as the carriage passed—most with warmth but a few with what looked to Willow like nervous obligation, their smiles a little too fixed.

Willow leaned toward Harrow. “Is there a governing council? Or is Severine the sole ruler?”

“Oh, we have advisers,” Harrow said. “Delightful creatures. Wise, too. But Severine has the final word in all matters of state. As she should.”

“Yes, well, sure,” Willow said. She hesitated, knowing that she needed to learn all she could about this realm. If Serrin was going to rule Eryth—with Willow at his side—she had a duty to be informed.

She didn’t know what questions to ask, really. Cole would. Cole would have opinions and ideas and suggestions on how to make things better. But Cole wasn’t here.

She cleared her throat and asked Harrow how laws in Eryth were passed, how leadership was decided, and when, exactly, Serrin would be expected to take the throne.

Harrow answered them all with the easy fluency of someone who had explained things many times before without ever quite explaining anything. “We are led by wisdom and consensus,” he said. “The people adore the prince, of course. But the queen will remain our guiding light.”

“Forever?”

“Until her light fades, which will be never.”

“Never? So then Serrin will never be king?”

Harrow clapped his hands, a single sharp pop that echoed off the cottage walls. “And look! The band!”

There had been no band a moment before, but now a brass ensemble came marching around the corner of a marzipan-colored cottage.

Their uniforms gleamed—leaf-green coats with split tails and golden piping, each cuff adorned with a trio of burnished acorns that jingled with every step.

Their instruments were polished to a mirror shine: trumpets that curled like fern fronds, drums shaped like honeypots, a tuba with the faint shimmer of a soap bubble at its bell.

At their head strode the bandleader, a woman of commanding presence and impossible height—at least seven feet tall.

Her uniform, while matching the others in color, featured epaulets made from gilded thistle heads and a collar stiff with embroidered vines.

She wore a monocle over one eye, though Willow couldn’t imagine what it was for.

She marched with perfect confidence, chin up, baton whirling like a wand.

With a flourish, she turned in place and lifted her baton high, and the band launched into a tune that sounded like a lullaby performed at double time.

One of the tuba players—a fae child no older than seven—looked exhausted and glassy-eyed, his cheeks puffing with effort.

A glittering ribbon wrapped tight around his wrist, tugging him upright whenever he sagged.

The rest of the ride passed in a blur of polished streets, curated wonder, and relentless musical accompaniment, now with accordions.

Willow felt less like a visitor and more like someone being presented with a portfolio.

Every corner, every turn, every glimmering lantern seemed chosen for her benefit.

It was lovely, all of it, but she missed Poppy’s ridiculous gowns and Jace’s sly willingness to break Aesra’s rules—as long as she felt sure she could get away with it.

Just that morning—before the pond, before the bird—Willow had been bemoaning the wildness of her curls.

Eryth’s humidity was perhaps the one aspect of this enchanted realm that refused to bend to magic, and as deft as Poppy was with combs and pins and pearlescent oils, Willow longed for something simpler.

An elastic hair tie—nothing more—so that she could twist her hair into a messy bun and be done with it.

“A hair tie?” Poppy had exclaimed, scandalized. “For the love of the queen, is that some cruel mortal custom where you bind your hair with a length of rubber until it screams and gives up?”

Willow had laughed. “Poppy, no. It’s not like torture. It’s just a little stretchy band you wrap around your hair.”

“The way mortals wrap thread around a baby’s toe to make it shrivel up and fall off?”

“What? Poppy. I don’t know where you’re getting your information, but nobody wraps a...” Her words trickled off because her mother had done exactly that to Juniper when Juniper was a baby. Willow had completely forgotten.

Juniper had been born with more than the usual number of toes, a sixth one tucked like a pearl beside the others on her right foot, and Willow and Ash had watched from the edge of the bed as their mother had looped a length of white thread around it.

“It’s actually a sign of good luck,” she’d said, voice light. “A sixth toe means fairy blood. But in elementary school, at a pool party, or in the summer if she wants to wear sandals...”

She’d glanced at them both. “You understand, don’t you?”

Ash had nodded first. Willow, slower.

Juniper’s sixth toe had turned purple over the next few days. Then black. And then one morning it had simply been gone.

Willow had felt a little sad. She’d asked if they’d buried it or at least marked the day.

“Absolutely not,” her mother had said. “Why dwell on things best forgotten?”

From the floor of Willow’s palace bedroom, Jace cleared her throat.

She’d been crouched over a music box, working on a jammed mechanism that no longer allowed a decorative butterfly to twirl around and around.

With a slim rod clamped between her teeth and a jeweler’s loupe perched over one eye, she’d concentrated on the task with the focus of a lock picker.

“If a piece of stretchy cord is all you need, I can fetch one,” she’d said. “Might take a day or two, but I know a guy.”

Jace, it seemed, knew a guy for everything.

After the Hospitality Tour, with its endless perfect delights came dinner, which was also perfect, though Willow couldn’t remember half of what she ate.

And after dinner came Evening Rites: fragrant oil dabbed on Willow’s wrists, a short poem recited over her head, a circle walked counterclockwise three times under the supervision of a curvy woman with cat ears who called herself a Nip.

By the time Willow was tucked into bed, her limbs were heavy with weariness—but sleep wouldn’t come. Unlike the deep, bewitched rest of her first night, she tossed and turned. Her body craved something. Not food, not fragrant oils, and certainly not another poem. Comfort, maybe?

When Poppy and Jace popped in to check on her, Willow sat up and said, “Could I have another hot chocolate?”

Poppy clapped her hands in delight. “Oh, bless! Isn’t she darling, Jace? Like a kitten pawing at the milk dish.”

“On it, miss,” Jace said, already doubling back the way she’d come.

When she returned, it was with the same ceramic pot and strawberry-dotted mug from the other nights. Willow smiled. Jace set the silver tray on the bedside table and poured the steaming chocolate with an exaggerated up-and-down tilt that sent the liquid arcing in a perfect ribbon from pot to cup.

At the last moment, the spoon she always wore tucked behind her ear clattered onto the tray with a bright, unmistakable ring.

“What is it with you and that spoon?” Willow asked. “You’re never without it.”

Poppy groaned. “Don’t get her started. That spoon of hers? Jace says it listens. She says it sees.”

“Only on Thursdays,” Jace replied, giving Willow a wink as she reclaimed the spoon.

“She once told a visiting dignitary she could stir dreams right into his teacup,” Poppy added. “Or nightmares, rather.”

“And what happened?”

“The dignitary—who happened to be very important—left in a huff,” Poppy said. “Aesra heard all about it, of course, and Jace ended up with a week’s duty in the ice vault.”

“The dignitary was a glimmerleech,” Jace said. “I found him with Maeve behind the west stairwell. He’d cornered her and was fumbling at her corset. If I didn’t help her, who would?”

“Who’s Maeve?” Willow asked. “And why wouldn’t someone else step in? Surely visitors can’t just... do that.”

“Certainly not!” Poppy said. “This isn’t like where you’re from, Willow. In Eryth, we have rules. Politenesses.”

“Only they don’t apply to Maeve,” Jace said evenly. “She’s Blighted.”

“Blighted?” Willow echoed.

A silence fell over the room. Jace busied herself with dabbing a spot of chocolate from the spout of the ceramic pot, while Poppy turned pink with consternation.