“All we want is our child back!” Simon’s father yelled into the face of a tree warrior. The faerie’s features were seemingly carved out of bark, with moss hanging off the side of his head like oddly cut hair.

“We’ve told you a score of times, we don’t have your pup,” piped up a mushroom faerie.

“We’d prefer not to fight,” Simon’s father said, “but we will if we must. We know about your weakness when cut with cold iron.”

There came a hiss from the nearby faeries at this threat.

“We know about your weakness when enchanted,” said a pixie with green wings and sharp teeth.

Never had Aurora been so glad that she’d had the foresight to forbid weapons from the festival.

“No one wants violence of any kind,” said Count Alain, to Aurora’s surprise. The crowd turned to see him and, noticing their queen standing to his side, bowed hastily.

“You are mistaken. The faeries do not have your boy,” Aurora told Simon’s family. “My own soldiers have sworn to me there’s no sign that faeries took him, but rather that it was the work of brigands.”

Simon’s father looked surprised, but he didn’t seem ready to believe her words.

“We told you!” said a hedgehog faerie, wrinkling his nose. “What do we want with a poxy human boy?”

That seemed about to set off Simon’s father again when Nanny Stoat arrived. She moved to stand next to Aurora.

“You heard the queen,” she said, making a shooing motion. “Time to disperse.”

“But one of the soldiers told me it was them,” Simon’s father said. “He said that those faeries there were the ones who carried off my child.”

“Who told you that?” Aurora asked.

Simon’s father looked around the festival desperately but then seemed confused. “I don’t know. He was here a moment ago.”

“It’s not true,” Aurora said.

Simon’s father’s expression turned mulish. “But he said—”

“Is that a way to talk to your sovereign ruler?” Nanny Stoat asked him, emphasizing her point by poking him in the leg with the end of the walking stick she held.

He shook his head, looking more repentant after her reprimand than he had following anything Aurora said.

Gathering himself up, he raised his eyes to Aurora’s. “You will tell me if you hear more news of him, won’t you? And you won’t stop looking?”

“I won’t stop looking,” Aurora said, although from what her castellan had told her, she wasn’t sure that anything more they heard would be at all good.

After he left, she turned to Nanny Stoat. “Thank you,” she said. “Without your support, I am not sure they would have believed me half as readily.” She looked around. “I hope this festival wasn’t foolish.”