We came to a wide clearing. At its center rose a ceiba tree whose steepled roots flowed like ridges from a massive trunk. Baskets hung from the big thorns that adorned the lower roots. Some were filled with rotting fruit or with animal flesh turned green and putrid with decay. Others gave off a pleasing scent of herbs and flowers. One was filled to the brim with fresh yam pudding that smelled so sweet and tasty that I licked my lips and barely restrained myself from scooping with my fingers and eating it all up. In one, a tiny little creature with a downy coat of feathers slept, curled up all cozy for a long eternity’s nap.

I found an empty basket and pulled it off the tree. “With your permission, Your Highness, I’d like to place your head in this basket so I have my hands free to climb.”

To my surprise she smiled, not in a friendly way but in the way a rich woman smiles when a servant brings her just the gown she wanted in the morning. “It is a proper place for me to rest.”

I wove grasses to make a nest that would keep her face angled up, for it seemed undignified to smash her facedown into the basket. A leather cord laced closed the lips of the basket. I fixed its strap around my body alongside the two flasks. Rory licked his foreleg.

I put a hand on the coarse fur of his neck. “Change into your man form as soon as you can. That’s how we’ll know we’ve crossed back into the mortal world.”

He looked up the thorn-ridden bole of the tree as if to ask me how we were meant to climb, with the lowest branches out of my reach and him with no hands able to grasp.

“We came in through the roots,” I said, “so we go out through the roots.”

I smeared the last moist dregs of his drying blood onto my fingers, then pricked my forearm on one of the thorns. Its sting burned into my skin. As we crept into the dark hollows beneath the vast architecture of roots, I wiped our blood on the bark.

Deep in the pit of the tree the shadows melted away into steps ascending. He went first. It quickly grew so dark I had to keep a hand against the curving trunk. My shoulder ached, less sore than before. The grim implication dogged my steps: I could never attack my sire with cold steel if it meant I would harm not just myself but Rory and every other servant of the Hunt.

“Pah!” said Rory, as if he were spitting something out.

“Rory!” My fingers spread across the skin of a muscular back.

“Ouch!” he added. “Don’t you think it’s strange that it hurts so much when no blade touched us?”