“What is it you ask of me?” the Aether continued. “I will do what I can for you, but I fear I cannot help you with the evil that dwells behind you. I have no power over her kind.”

“No . . . sir,” Rosa whispered. “But my friend Pieter, the troll to the north of here, does. Could you possibly take a message to him swiftly?”

“Ah! A simple, trivial request. So trivial, I gladly go out of friendship. What shall I tell him?”

“Come as quickly as he can!” Rosa begged.

“I shall carry your scent with me, and leave him a trail to follow. Farewell!”

The scent of ozone vanished. “Is he gone?” Rosa asked. “The last time I encountered something like that . . . well, it was the remnant of a god.”

“Yes,” Giselle told her. Rosa nodded, and they crept back to the bushes, parting them to look at the cottage.

Time crawled. She knew that the aether would probably get to Pieter within moments. How long was it going to take Pieter to get here? She didn’t think the troll was all that fast. And would he understand the urgency? She had no idea how bright he was, but . . .

The door to the cottage opened, and a flood of light came from within, a light too strong to have come from something like candles or an oil lamp. A strange creature emerged from the door, and there was so much light Giselle could see it perfectly clearly. It looked vaguely human . . . but its arms and legs were too long, and too spindly; its torso was too short, and it seemed to have next to no neck, just a hunched-over back with a head jutting from the top of it, a head covered with an unruly shock of straw-like hair. The more Giselle looked at it, the more inhuman it looked, as if everything about it was wrong in some way. It didn’t move right, the joints bent in unnatural places. It made her a little sick to look at, and her skin began to crawl.

It was dressed in black rags, and when it turned sideways for a moment, she saw it had a face that was like the caricature of an evil witch in a child’s book, all nose and chin, with glowing green eyes. It was the eyes that made her feel truly horrid, although she could not have said why. The eyes were the least human thing about it. There was a malevolence there that she could not even begin to measure.

It reached into the cottage and pulled out something. No, it was not a something, it was a someone.