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. “Françoise. 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 Françoise 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 Françoise 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.”
“Shouldn’t you hate me, though? It’s my great-grandma who dragged you into all this.”
“She, not you. Even her I did not hate. She didn’t know what they would do to me.”
“That’s true. I don’t think she would’ve done it if she knew.”
“She told me so once, years ago. I have forgiven her. But I am still here, of course, and am always looking for ways to lessen the cruelties we commit. I’m usually powerless to stop them. If anyone is coming tonight to save your tribemates…” She waited for Kit to confirm it. He didn’t move, still not daring to give anything away. Flowerwatch let her head droop. “I would be glad to see your two friends get away, that’s all. Glad for you, and for them.”
“What could the locals even do to you guys? I thought you were immortal.”
“Yes, but if we transgress, they can steal property from us. Some of our gold. Or they can take one of us and transform us into their kind, so that we will not be goblin-kind again.”
“Isn’t that exactly what you want?”
“Me, yes. Most of my tribe, though, they would hate it. Or at least, they would choose not to be transformed, but once they were, they would become tranquil enough. Therefore I do wish it…if help were coming tonight, perhaps…”
“Yeah, well. That isn’t looking too likely. But thanks for trying.”
Flowerwatch nodded unhappily.
“Flowerwatch!” Redring’s voice sliced through the noise.
Flowerwatch jumped, pushed the gag back into Kit’s mouth, and looked up.
Redring scrambled over. “Why do you linger over this useless lump? Come celebrate.”
“Yes. Yes.” Flowerwatch hunched down, hands splayed on the deck. “I was merely making sure his bonds were tight. So he will not disturb our revels.”
“If he does, we’ll kill him.” Redring honestly sounded like she didn’t care one way or the other, like these years of liaison interaction meant nothing to her. It chilled Kit’s blood. “He’s so nasty and rude, I wouldn’t mind an excuse.” She smiled at him, baring her pointed teeth.
Kit glared back, then recalled his desired future of staying alive alongside Livy, and dropped his gaze.
Redring sneered in triumph, kicked him in the thigh, and pulled Flowerwatch away toward the dancing tribe.
Climbing a hundred-foot-tall tree without any safety gear would be hard enough. Climbing a frozen tree, Livy found, was even harder. Frost and ice clung to the bark, making her boots slip on the skinny branches. She had managed not to fall, hanging on to branches with her gloved hands, but she squeaked in alarm at every slip, and shook from exertion and that special fear she got when she looked over the railings of high bridges.
She didn’t look down often on this ascent. She had made that mistake once so far, and it had felt like all her insides plummeted back to the ground. The snow made it worse, because she could see the whitened ground, and how far away it was, too clearly. Much better to only look upward, at the line of glowing blue mushrooms guiding her.
She estimated she was halfway up by now. The tree remained thick in circumference, the handhold branches still solid enough even if they did bend more than she liked when she hung her weight from them. The higher she climbed, the more the wind buffeted her and made the tree sway.
Air fae, meanwhile, swished by as fast as the wind, ghostly wisps that changed shape like puffs of mist, hovering for a second now and then to look at her. Some took the forms of birds or other flying creatures: she spotted a raven, a white owl, and a brown spotted moth, all of which she would have taken for ordinary animals except that they dissolved into clouds and blew away among the snowflakes.
She reached the canopy, or at least its underlayers. Here the cedar stretched out wide branches with scaly green needles. The path of glowing mushrooms ventured off the trunk and out along a branch as thick around as her waist. Livy climbed until the branch was at chest level, wrapped both hands around it, and with a whimper of reluctance, pulled her knees up on top of it.
Now she had no choice; she had to look down. It was practically impossible not to when you crawled along a horizontal branch. Her gaze locked onto the forest floor so far below, past the hundreds of dark branches she had climbed. Snowflakes tumbled in the vast space between her and the earth, their motion making her so dizzy that she dropped to her belly and twined all four limbs around the branch.
She squeezed her eyes shut. “I’m going to fall. If I fall, I’m off the path, and that’s it.”
“Keep going.” The whisper was aloof, but soothing. “Our path is safe.”
Livy opened her eyes to find the hummingbird hovering next to her. It darted back and forth, hanging in mid-air like any hummingbird, but when it moved it left a temporary sparkling trail in the air. “How long till dawn?” she asked it.
“Not long. You can still get there if you keep going.”
She turned her head forward. The mushroom path led along the branch, disappearing several yards ahead under the hanging green fingers of the branch above. The canopy blocked most of her view of the goblin hideout, but through gaps between branches, she caught sight of the lanterns. The wind blew laughter and guttural voices to her.
Skye was there. In their hands.
Livy began inching along the branch on her belly. “I sure hope you have a plan for getting us down, that’s all.”
“The way will depend on the outcome.” Having delivered that enigmatic pronouncement, the hummingbird zoomed away.
Moss and lichen carpeted the top side of the branch; a soft surface to crawl on, at least. It was also frosty, and thus more slippery. Soon came a dreadful moment: the branch narrowed, and the path hopped down onto a different branch, a Douglas-fir this time, some five feet below Livy’s branch. It was time to switch trees.
“No,” she begged.
But she couldn’t crawl back down this branch, descend the tree, and leave Skye to an endless fate as a goblin. So although every part of her body trembled, she lowered her legs into the air, hanging onto the cedar branch. It felt like she was dangling above the Earth from a satellite. Her shaking feet touched the fir branch, which sagged alarmingly under her.
“Oh God. Please don’t let me fall.”
Snowflakes and air fae flitted past her face. The goblins caroused loudly, a few trees away.
The fir branch steadied. Livy settled her feet, let go of the cedar branch, and let herself drop onto the new branch on her front. She flung both arms around it. Christmas-tree scent from its crushed needles engulfed her face.
“Okay, tree. Don’t drop me.” After her trembling had subsided a little, she focused on the glowing mushroom path, and started scooting along, ankles locked around the branch.
The transfer to the next tree a few minutes later, a western hemlock, went more smoothly. She got to stand and hoist herself up onto the new branch this time, which felt less frightening than dropping down.
Now she could see more of the goblin village. It reminded her of one of Kit’s sculptures, except evil instead of lovely: a junkyard’s worth of boards, scrap metal, and lights, probably held together more by magic than by nails. The things bouncing around on it and screeching at each other emphasized the ghoulish atmosphere. This was her first look at the goblins in person, and though she was still too far off to see them clearly, she could tell Skye’s drawing had accurately captured their repulsiveness.
One more tree to transfer onto, then the next move after that would be the drop onto the goblins’ decks. Livy kept glancing at the lair as she scooted along. Though it made her want to scream in agony, she was trying to decide which of those knobby creatures was Skye. The tribe did seem to pay special attention to a pair who was rolling around and rutting against each other, snarling at anyone who tried to join in. Grady and Skye, quite likely. A nauseating thought. Although not as nauseating as the idea of it being Skye and some other goblin.
Livy forced her aching thighs and bruised knees to speed up. Soon it came time for the drop onto the next tree, a spruce. In her hastiness to reach Skye, she dropped onto the branch without bracing her feet properly, and they slipped on the icy, curved bark. With a shriek, she plummeted under the spruce branch. She held onto it with her hands, but not securely enough; she hadn’t had time to find an ideal grip, and the moss was peeling off, crumbling away, under her gloves.
“Oh God, oh no no no,” she sobbed.
A powerful gust of wind surged through the forest. The trees swayed and sighed; tiny ice pellets struck her cheek. The wind lifted another branch just under her feet, holding it there long enough for her to shove her boots against it and push herself higher, wrapping her hands in a stronger grasp around the spruce branch. She hauled herself up onto it and clung to it, gasping. “Thank you. If that was you, air fae, thank you so much.”
Maybe they honestly wouldn’t let her fall, then. But she wouldn’t count on it. She crawled the rest of the path with extra caution, testing each patch for ice before shifting her weight onto it.
Finally she reached the end of her path, three or four feet above the outer railing of the goblins’ decks. The section below looked deserted at the moment, as most of the tribe was frolicking in the large central deck some twenty yards along, to her left. But other goblins could lurk in one of these huts atop the decks. She couldn’t see inside them, beyond a few glimpses through cracked, mismatched windows. Some huts were dark, while firelight glowed in others. On the outside walls, the goblins had strapped machetes, axes, bows and arrows, and other lethal tools, the way normal people hung kayaks and paddles upon garage walls.
So many ways they could kill her.
The golden frog zoomed into view. “Well done, Olivia Darwen. Dawn is in mere minutes. Remember, they will sense you as soon as you touch their dwellings, but we will do what we can to keep them from harming you.”
She swallowed. “I’m supposed to get Redring’s ring?”
“Yes. When you arrive, say to them, ‘I claim these three humans back, for they were wrongly stolen from my tribe.’ Then when you have the ring, give it to me, and we will use its magic to disband the goblins if we can.”
“If you can? Wait, three humans?”
“They have the liaison as well. He came to them.”
“What? Kit did? Oh my God.”
“He has not been transformed. They cannot do that to him. But they have tied him up and may hurt him further. So go, Olivia Darwen.”
“But how? How am I supposed to walk up to this deadly, strong goblin leader and just take her most treasured possession from around her neck?”
The frog looked somber. “Any way you can.”
Livy felt like she was ripping up all her hopes and tossing them into the winter wind. “Well, this is…this is just insanity.” But then, it had been insanity to think she could survive the path through earth, water, fire, and air, yet she had.
Joining her ripped-up hopes, she jumped through the wind, and landed on the goblins’ lair.