But it was working; the head was slowly changing as I watched. As was the landscape behind it. At first slowly, with winter melting into fall and then to summer, before picking up the pace and moving faster and faster. Until the seasons were retreating in a long, blurry line.

Under my hand, the head changed, too. The stains slowly faded, the mold retreated, the lichen shortened. And before I realized it, the bones were being covered over with flesh, hair was reappearing on the skull in tufts, brought and tucked into place by the nesting birds that had stolen it, as if the subject was receiving hair plugs. And, finally, the whole thing was clothed in skin, still warm to the touch.

The backward motion halted abruptly, but not before I felt blood, warm and red and sticky, cascade over my fingers.

“Do what you must,” Gertie gasped. “Quickly!”

That was good advice for more than one reason. I could hear fey voices calling to each other from above. I couldn’t understand what they were saying, but the tone made it likely that my disembodied arm had been noticed by some eagle-eyed scout. Probably because they’d just thrown the head down here, with the splatter of mud across the dead features still as liquid as the blood.

And then an arrow took the dead creature between the eyes, and I was out of time.

I started to pull back, accepting defeat, when—

“Ah, I knew I smelled one somewhere.”

The language wasn’t English, wasn’t even close. I could hear the words, the real words, and they were alien to my ears. Yet my mind translated them anyway. I didn’t speak any fey language, if that was even what it was…

But Pritkin did.

I frowned. I thought we were only supposed to be borrowing magic, not knowledge. Or was Pritkin translating for me, via Mircea’s mental abilities?

“Pritkin?” I thought, but I heard nothing back.

Crell looked up, with honey dripping from his hand, and with a wild storm of bees buzzing around his head. The bees were angry. It was late in the season, and they did not want to be raided. They were worried that they would not have enough food for winter.

And now so was Crell.

“Mine!” he said, glaring at the newcomer, and pulled the hive away.

The creature laughed, the motion spangling the surrounding trees with light shadows. “Oh, you can keep the honey, monster. I’m after something else entirely.”

Pain, bursting behind his eyes, ripping, tearing, burning.

Crell threw up a burly arm, blocking another spell, and intended to melt into the shadows of the forest. His kind were big, but they could move silently when they wished, and the forest would help him. Already, the treetops were thrashing, the birds and animals crying out, creating enough of a ruckus to hide a dozen of his kin.

But then the forest was gone.