Page 2 of The Wind and the Wild (The Keepers of Faerie #1)

“ Never made it past the trees,” I say, ignoring the market comment, and settle the open satchel onto the edge of the quilt. She pauses, hands me the socks, and leans over the bag.

“ Did one bite you?”

“ Not very successfully. They’re too tiny.

” I repeat the tale I told Da and watch crinkles form around her eyes as she thinks.

Absently, she takes my hand and rubs the old place where the skin was once torn apart.

It’s still tender after years, but her touch is gentle.

I let her and Da inspect it whenever they’re concerned, as if sometimes they believe it’ll reopen.

Even faerie scars do not do such things.

“ Da’s going to handle it,” I say with ease when the crinkles don’t even out. “ I won’t go around the trees for a few days, until we make sure no one’s seen anything.”

Finally, she quirks a smile, scooping up one of the kittens and giving its head a scratch. “ We have milk you can try.”

I don’t know much about faerie creatures, but everyone knows to leave out milk as a gift. Honey or sweets of any sort also work, but these are baby animals. Kittens themselves need milk, after all.

For the rest of the day, I comfort myself by baking with ingredients found in any old mortal market—apples and dough and spices—and several pies later, I have flour in my hair.

I move on to roasting a quail that Niall snared on the edge of the thinner trees, where getting lost is less likely to end in an accidental trip to Faerie.

He’s sitting at the table with Una—the two of them pretending they aren’t making eyes at each other and very likely poking one another under the table—both inspecting the little kittens.

The creatures refused their milk, as well as the honey, bread, sugar, berries, mashed berries, softened bread, and scraps of yesterday’s pork I tried.

Perhaps they are frightened, though they seem perfectly happy in the old quilt I found them, and they take water well.

Perhaps they are homesick or miss their mother.

Perhaps they do not care for human food, which will be quite the problem.

I consider leaving them back at the border and slam a few potatoes down harder than necessary. Una and Niall exchange looks.

“ Don’t look at each other like that,” I say, brandishing a squash.

“ You’re stressing and cooking,” Una says, and Niall tries to hide a laugh in the too-short beard he’s so proud of. Though rather nice, it’s not nearly enough to hide his amusement.

“ I need to find something to feed them.” I wave the squash at the wriggling kittens. “ Unless you have anyone in Faerie I can drop them off with.”

Una wrinkles her nose. She’s a long-haired beauty with skin like Mam’s smooth porcelain plates and eyes as spring grasses.

A braid keeps her golden locks together.

She and Niall are adorable together, even if most of the village has no idea anything is happening between the two.

Even Da has hinted once or twice that organizing my dowry with Niall’s parents would be a wise match.

He is strong and broad shouldered, as a blacksmith’s son would tend to be, with a kind face and kinder heart.

If he hadn’t been in my life for as long as I can remember, the three of us growing taller with grass scratching our legs and soaking ourselves in frog-croaking ponds, perhaps it would be a lovely match.

In private, the three of us had a fine laugh about my da’s hints. Besides, everyone will eventually figure out the two are spending too much time with each other past childhood friends. Even I don’t spend every waking moment with either of them.

“ Niamh, tell me you wouldn’t,” Una says, and I watch her delicate shoulders shudder. She glances across the kitchen and through the house as if she can see past the walls and the woods beyond them. She has always been more nervous of Faerie than I am.

More so in the past few years.

Niall says, “ She would.”

I throw a peel of the squash at him. It gives a wet smack against the middle of his temple. Una giggles, though it holds some tight nerves.

I truly would not. We do not meet the fae.

We do not make eye contact if we stumble into their path.

We do not disturb their mushroom circles, and if we hear their music, we stuff our fingers into our ears and run with a prayer.

In such ways, we maintain peace with our otherworldly neighbors in the woods.

Old tales say they protect us from monsters leaving their borders, and I tend to believe so.

Hundreds of tales were passed down through warnings and songs until they became less individual events and more a blanket draped over the village, a constant murmur in the backs of our minds: changeling children who eat their siblings and run wild back to Faerie, girls who go tumbling in the grasses with faerie men and lose their minds forever, young men who chase after the calls of what should be a woman’s voice in the trees only to never see the sky again. ..

Of all these tales, we keep in mind one thing: if we are being protected from monsters by other monsters, we do not irritate Faerie’s more benevolent inhabitants.

We leave milk or honey or sweets whenever we stumble across a place they frequent.

Only on midsummer do we listen to their music.

Getting a little lost to enter the edges of Faerie to pick berries does not precisely equate to disturbing their peace.

I’ve never, not in all my years of stumbling in and out, seen more than a few flashes of a bird’s wing or other small creature in the undergrowth.

A few times, music passed over my ears but was gone the moment I raised my head in preparation to flee.

Likely it was my own fear playing on my mind.

On the edges, Faerie is much like our kingdom of Nevyan, if the air were not so strangely heavy that I can taste the sweetness of it upon my tongue.

“ I truly would not,” I repeat aloud, in case my face betrays me.