Finally the path opened into a cool gray-and-white world: the snowy forest, untouched by flame. The last few feet of the path turned out to be glowing red embers—a walk on coals—even though the surrounding trees weren’t on fire here. Livy didn’t slow to think about it. She put on an extra burst of speed and ran straight over the embers. In five seconds she was across, and came to a gasping stop on the snow-dusted forest floor, the soles of her boots smoking slightly.
She bent over, hands on her knees, coughing up sooty phlegm and spitting it out. The firelight faded away. The air turned cold again. Her whole body felt sunburned. She picked up a handful of snow and dabbed it against her face and arms. Where it touched her burns, the pain faded. In surprise, she packed more fresh snow onto the blistering burn between her glove and coat sleeve, where some of the fabric had been singed and warped. When the snow melted away, her skin had been healed, though the fabric was still gone.
“Oh, thank God.” Livy flopped down into the snow and rolled gently from front to back, letting the cold erase the damage.
Magic. How bizarre, how terrible, how fortunate.
She stood back up. Spark-sized creatures glimmered in the air. “Got to say,” she told them, “after earth, water, and fire, air cannot be that bad.”
Then, squinting above, she realized that one of the light-clusters she had taken for glowing fae in the treetops was actually a collection of lightbulbs and lanterns. Music, screeches, and cackles drifted down from it, audible now that the fire’s roar was gone.
A small white shape zoomed up to her and hovered: a hummingbird, an all-white one, a type she had never seen. “The goblins’ lair,” it told her.
“Oh. Wow.”
The lair wasn’t directly overhead; it was still fifty yards deeper into the forest, but now it seemed frighteningly close.
“Wouldn’t they have seen that fire?” Livy said. “Won’t they see me?”
“No. We cloaked it from them, as we have cloaked you. Until you touch their dwellings or their trees, they will not see you. But dawn approaches. You must climb to them. That is your air path.”
“But…” Livy’s gaze stayed locked on the lights of the goblin treehouses. “That’s got to be a hundred feet up. Is there a ladder, or…”
“You must take your path.”
Livy spotted a line of glowing shelf-shaped mushrooms climbing the trunk of a big cedar nearby. She picked through the snowy ferns to the cedar, laid her hand on the bark, and frowned up at the mushrooms. “But the goblins aren’t even in this tree.” There wasn’t a ladder, just lots of small branches someone could, in theory, grab onto and climb.
“If you climb their trees directly, they will sense you. Your path must go through other trees, and thence to their dwellings.”
“What?” Livy swung to stare at the hummingbird. “I have to climb through the canopy? Like, jump from one tree to another, way up there? Without even a safety rope or anything?”
“Your path,” it said again, calmly. “The air fae will guide you.”
“Oh, for the love of God.” Livy ran her gaze up the path, following it until the glow of the mushrooms faded in the dizzying height of the trees. “Okay, I take it back. Air is going to be just as bad.”
She gripped a small branch in each hand, found footholds, and began to climb.
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
KIT DIDN’T BOTHER STRUGGLING ANYMORE. HE LAY ON HIS SIDE ON THE MOSSY DECK, NOT EVEN CARING THAT THE dancing, thumping feet of the goblins were rattling the boards against his skull.
Livy hadn’t come. Chances were good she was trapped, hurt, stuck in an enchantment, or even dead. Any number of fates could have befallen her. Goblin scouts could have snuck out and waylaid her. The dangers of the fae path could have ensnared her—some of the other fae sounded nearly as treacherous as the goblins, if legends were true. She could be lying alive but insane, maddened by a spell, never to return to the human world. If she didn’t come back…his heart felt like it was tearing itself through his chest at the thought. He wouldn’t dwell on it, not yet. She might still arrive.
But if she did, she’d be too late. Grady and Skye had changed into goblins; it was done. Soon the tribe would probably throw Kit off this treehouse and let him die slowly in the snow from his injuries and hypothermia. He hardly even cared about that, except then they’d go latch onto some new liaison. One of Grady’s siblings, maybe; another perfectly nice cousin whose life he’d be destroying. He’d rather keep the burden himself than let it fall on anyone else.
If he could go on living after tonight, and if he had Livy, maybe that’d be enough. At least she knew the truth about his messed-up life. If she and he, both of them bereaved, had each other to lean on, maybe they could get through…though really, she might not love him anymore once she’d lost her sister to his family curse. He couldn’t blame her if that was how she felt.
Grady and Skye lay beneath a table, making out, or whatever exactly you’d call that tangle in a pair of goblins. He tried not to look at them. They’d become gargoyles, hideous.
The rest of the tribe had mostly ignored Kit. Now a scratchy hand touched his shoulder, and a small goblin crouched before him. Her necklace dangled into his line of sight: an ancient pocket watch with a flower etched on it.
“Their new forms are not permanent until dawn,” Flowerwatch said. “So if anyone were to interfere before then…the locals, perhaps…they could yet save your friends.” She held his gaze, anxious.
Kit glowered back.
Flowerwatch glanced over her shoulder, then hooked a finger into his fabric gag and tugged it down so he could speak.
He smacked his tongue, shuddered, and glared at her again. “You know I can’t talk to the locals. Lot of good this information does me. Why are you nice to me, anyhow?”
Though her gray-blue eyes were too round and big for her face, they looked more human than most of the goblins’. She had only sparse hairs on her head, but the way they curled around her ears to chin length reminded him of a young woman with long bangs. He could almost picture what she used to look like, maybe. “Do you know who I was?” she said.
He softened a little. “Fran?oise. Or such is the rumor.”
She nodded, lowering her gaze. “Most forget their old lives. But I’ve made a point of remembering.” She clicked a latch at the side of the pocket watch, and it opened. A tiny square of paper fell into her hand, folded and stained and falling apart at the creases. After another fearful glance back at the reveling tribe, she unfolded the paper to show him. Pencil handwriting covered it.
He made out Je m’appelle Fran?oise Gourcuff before giving up with a sigh. “I don’t really know French.”
She refolded it and tucked it back into the watch. “It says, ‘My name is Fran?oise Gourcuff. I was enchanted and taken away by the goblins when I was twenty, just before I would have married. I would have been a wife and a mother, and my human life was taken from me. I do not ever want to forget.’ I have kept it all these years. One’s name-token is sacred; no one dares touch it. I read it whenever I can, so that I always remember and never truly become one of them.”
He studied her downcast face. “Has it worked?”
She nodded. “The others assimilate. But I have never completely let myself belong.”