“New experiences are hard to come by,” Zee agreed. “Unless you work with Mercy. I’ve been having all sorts of new experiences since I met her.”

Beauclaire smiled appreciatively.

I said, “We decided it would work best to go in with Adam as wolf. Guns don’t work in Underhill.” And wasn’t that too bad. “And we can’t take steel or iron. So our best weapon is going to come in ready to defend us.”

“You will stay human?” he asked.

I shrugged. “At least I can talk to Aiden this way.” The only other time I’d been in Underhill, I’d been in coyote form. The very scary fae I’d met there—a fae that Zee had treated with more caution than he did any of the Gray Lords—had known exactly what I was anyway.

If my coyote skin wouldn’t serve as camouflage, there was no reason not to stay human. I could carry more that way. I wasn’t entirely sure that I could change shape in Underhill. I hadn’t tried before, and Zee worried that only fae magic would work there. But Aiden needed a cheering section and, if the walking stick cooperated, I probably needed to be in human shape to use it.

I also probably should have grabbed the walking stick off the chest of drawers when we left. But it had seemed wrong. When the walking stick chose to come to my aid—it just came. Taking it with me . . . I worried that it wouldn’t work.

Adam’s change took a little less than five minutes. Not as fast as Charles’s—the Marrok’s son, who had been born a werewolf, could sometimes change as fast as I could, between one blink and the next. But it was faster than most werewolves. He shook himself and stretched like a cat, his claws making clicking sounds on the marble floors. Then he walked up to me as Tad gathered his fallen clothing.

I grabbed Aiden’s pack and helped him to settle it comfortably. My pack was a lot heavier. Adam, we decided, needed to be free to move, so I carried most of our supplies. Food for a week, water for a day, and a very light boatload of technology-lightened-and-miniaturized backpacking supplies. Also six hard-boiled eggs from the dozen I’d made at breakfast. Baba Yaga might not have meant anything when she’d told me that hard-boiled was best, but I wasn’t taking any chances. Aiden had a pack, too, but however old he really was, his body was that of a ten-year-old. His pack was mostly his bedroll and freeze-dried food.

We hadn’t brought a tent. Even if it rained, we couldn’t afford to blind ourselves like that when we slept.

“We’re ready now,” I told Beauclaire.