Page 1 of The Wind and the Wild (The Keepers of Faerie #1)

N o one finds Faerie unless they are lost. Or, more often than not, Faerie lures in those it desires.

In Faerie, names are not known. Water tastes like sunlight, food like sugar with the barest dash of needed salt.

Music is spun for dancing until toes fall off and the cobbler comes to rebind shoes in the dead of night.

Songs are sung until no one can speak their own name in the morning, if they remember it at all.

In Faerie, everything is strange, incorrect and too beautiful, which is why I know the little things wriggling in the leaves just outside the thickest portion of the trees have come from those lands.

I almost fell across them, almost trampled them beneath my boots, eyes half closed as I picked a tree to get lost beside. One let off a squeak, and I nearly leapt from my skin. I’ve met faerie monsters on the edges of Faerie before, but they did not make such harmless noises.

But I am not lost between the trees, so these little beasts should not be here.

Carefully, I turn the nearest plump body over with my pinkie, worried of getting bitten.

I cannot say precisely what they resemble—barn cats, perhaps, or newborn mountain cats, or something else entirely.

Blue in fur like the night sky, mainly black and speckled with white, they bear long flat faces and tiny needle teeth. I’ve never seen the like.

“ Hello, little things,” I whisper, for it is always too quiet when nearly lost on the edge of Faerie.

If I bring them to the village, they will simply be tossed back into these trees or set in one of the little shrines along the edges of the woods in hopes one of their own kind will discover and retrieve them.

There are a few who may simply dispose of them in the river and pray that puts an end to it, but most know better. We do not tempt faerie curses.

I glance through the thinning trunks, considering. No path weaves this way. I was on my way to becoming lost, but not quite. Wind clips a springtime breeze through the new buds and the winter-cold needles of year-round trees. Briars poke my ankles.

Something smells of blood.

I step over the kittens, taking a few paces into the trees, which are perfectly normal now that I’ve paused to gather my surroundings.

Red taints the leaves of a nearby bush. It is too dark, and I keep my fingers to myself.

More tufts of the strange blue-black fur are scattered here and there, caught in a bloody bramble, brushed against the rough bark of the nearest tree.

Hunt hounds on the border . They will eat anything they pass; strange faerie kittens doubtlessly receive the same treatment. I chew the insides of my cheeks until I taste iron.

Returning to the kittens, I scoop them into my satchel one by one, counting nine in total.

They nip sleepily, their eyes barely open, but can’t break my skin.

I ventured here meaning to gather berries—Mam and Da are leaving tomorrow, and I mean to send them away with a few tarts—but it isn’t a wise idea, not now.

I’ll make do with what I have in the house.

I can keep the little things in the barn.

My parents won’t mind. I won’t be telling anyone else about the blood and traces of whatever larger beasts there were so close to our trees, but they’ll need to know.

Da holds weight in this village, even if he and Mam are leaving for a few weeks.

I can decide what to do with the kittens when they’re not clinging to life.

Where the trees thin, spring grasses rise, whispering in the breeze not blocked by trunks.

A half dozen old shrines, piles of stones no taller than my knee, dot the edges of the woods, but we do not often leave offerings to the fae—not until midsummer arrives.

The village is between me and home, so I skirt the edges of it, sprinting in my light rough skirts meant for traipsing about the woods.

Hiking them up to my thighs so I can run uninhibited, I hold my satchel to my chest and bolt past the outermost houses.

In the spring, they are half hidden by high golden-green grasses, dandelion tufts catching on thatching newly replaced with the ending of the rains.

Una waves as she pauses beside her cottage, eyebrows bunched. I wasn’t supposed to be back so soon—and certainly not fleeing full speed with grasses scraping my legs. I drop my skirts to wave back.

A fence runs up one side of the road from the village to our cottage.

Da has earned a fine living organizing the trading of our excess crops and the skins the trappers bring in with the closest cities in exchange for items we cannot so easily produce in a tiny village.

After a few decades, he and my mam gathered enough to build a tidy little cottage at the edge of the trees.

You’re practically the noble daughter of our little hamlet , Una once told me with a laugh when we were not much higher than the grasses ourselves. Our house is perhaps a third larger than hers, but it matters not. We have enough money to worry less, and this is a boon.

“ That’s a bit of running,” Da says as I bolt past him through the entrance to the barn just tall enough for our draft horse. Sweet hay and horse dust hangs in the air, familiar and warm, baking in the oven of the barn’s rafters. Our cow, Primrose, lows at me from the fence outside.

Da’s in one of the stalls, brushing out the mare with her blue-gray coat and dark nose. I shuffle to a stop and open the gate to her stall, closing the wailing thing with a grimace.

Mam learned long ago not to dissuade me from sprinting wherever I’m going, and now that I’ve reached two decades, there’s no stopping me. But I did nearly spook the horse this time.

“ Sorry. Da, look—”

He takes an eyeful of my dress, not my satchel, with the knowing eyebrow of my daughter has been in the woods again .

I open the loose top and lift out one of the wriggling creatures, ignoring when it gnaws on my thumb.

Its teeth are sharp, but there isn’t strength behind its jaw yet.

Da pauses, setting aside the horse brush and taking the little monster with more than some hesitation.

It fits neatly within his palm with fingers to spare.

He is a large man, broad in the shoulders, and probably should have sired a larger daughter, but I was born under the moonlight, and children born under the moon are always smaller and wilder than they ought to be.

With his height, I manage to be a hair above the other women in my village.

“ In the woods?” he asks, turning the creature over.

“ Just on the edge. I hadn’t stumbled in yet.”

I used to give both him and Mam a fit, purposefully dropping myself into Faerie, but I don’t go far, never enough to become fuzzy-headed or lose my way back.

It’s strangely easier leaving than it is finding my way in.

Besides, plenty of beautiful and delicious things grow just inside the spot where the air shimmers—I needn’t go farther.

There are rumors of more dangerous places near the edges, of course, hag huts and old abandoned libraries, though I’ve never seen such things in the few places I’ve found safe to enter.

Then again, I’ve never searched them out.

“ I think there was... something else,” I hedge, picking leaves off my skirt. “ I saw blood on a bush. I don’t think it was from a person.”

We ’re both thinking of hunt hounds, which haven’t touched the border in years. I rub my arm and wait for him to speak.

“ Don’t show these to anyone,” he says, handing back the squirming creature. “ I’ll tell Cillian I saw the blood when I was walking through the woods. Where was it?”

“ Beside a small pine near the large hawthorn. I think you should find it if you walk straight out from Emma’s cottage. I can show you.”

He shakes his head. “ I’ll look. And show these to your mam so you don’t give her a fright if she stumbles across them. I’m going to put off our trip for a day”—he eyes me from over his bushy red beard—“and I want you to stay out of Faerie for a few days until we figure out what’s happened.”

I nod, not particularly happy but more than willing to do as he suggests if there are hunt hounds near the border. It’s easy to still feel their claws in my hand, to remember the certainty I would die.

Da must know I’m thinking of it and takes my face in his rough hands to kiss my forehead. His beard tickles my nose.

“ Go tell your mam,” he repeats, and I take the little creatures with me, still catching my breath. They are small and barely moving. I can keep them in my room. In the barn, something may discover them.

Mam is still folding away some of her things; I hear her upstairs.

The cottage isn’t large by the standards of the city Da took me to once, but it’s comfortable.

A nice little second story fits both my room and my parents’, the walls whitewashed and soft.

I thump up the steps, careful not to frighten the babies in their satchel, and bump the door to my parents’ bedroom open with my shoulder.

It’s a quaint room, large enough for their wide bed and two dresser tables with their little matching carved washing basins.

They’re entirely too cute with each other, which drove me mad in my younger years.

The white linen curtains are thrown back, letting in the sun, but they’ll be closed when they leave for the few weeks.

Open windows at night is an invitation for the fae, after all.

“ Mam? ”

She pauses in her folding of extra socks into the thick embroidered bag. “ I thought the market was setting up early?”

And I thought you’d be off in the woods , is the other question behind the words. My parents don’t mind my little adventures so long as I come back with suitable ingredients and promise to run with everything in my legs if I see anything resembling a faerie—humanlike or otherwise.