None shall harm this child of mine.

It was an odd song. Back then, Bardán had not thought about what it meant. He had only known that it made him feel calm and happy and safe. It had told him he was loved.

And now, now that the boy who wept long and hard over his mother’s grave is a man himself, now that his father, too, is gone, Bardán understands. The song is about give and take. It is about keeping the balance. Look after the wood, and the wood looks after you. Respect all that dwell in the wood: the birds in the trees, the fish in the streams, the creatures that run and walk and creep on the land. The trees, every kind. And the fey . . . but there the meaning blurs. Respect the fey and they won’t play tricks. Leave a bowl of bread and milk on the doorstep at night. Tie offerings in the hawthorn. Build your house just right. That is what it should mean. But it isn’t so, can’t be, or why would the fey have stolen a baby and left that turnip child in his place? Had his grandparents failed to respect the laws of the wood? He’d asked his father this, but his father would not talk about them, the parents whose hearts had been broken on that long-ago day, the parents who had been dead and gone by the time their true son came back home with his unusual bride.

‘Once they stole, twice they stole, stole them right away,’ Bardán murmurs, looking out through the broken door of his shelter, where moonlight gleams faintly on the pale limbs of a willow. From where he lies he cannot see the moon itself, and that is good. Hidden here, in the dark, he feels safer. On his own, out of the way, in the quiet. Only he wishes Grim was here. He likes Grim’s stories, though he was glad the one about the Red Giant never got finished. A story like that couldn’t have a happy ending. Once they stole, twice they stole . . . Why can’t he get that out of his head?