Some of the rest of my senses were there, too, because I felt the flute being torn from my grasp a moment later, and an angry fey telling me off in words I only half understood. He must be speaking some dialect that Pritkin didn’t know, I thought, as he shook me. Only he wasn’t shaking me; my body was currently being dragged out of the leaf pile by a couple of panting, cursing women. But Kåre…

The forest winked out, and in its place, I saw a little boy, sitting at a rough wooden table in a house made of stone, being presented with a flute by an older, male fey. The older fey was dressed in a leather jerkin that looked like it had seen more than a few winters, and his face contained lines that I’d rarely seen on one of their kind. And, unlike the fey warriors I’d encountered a few times, who had mostly left their long hair free, his was barely shoulder-length and tied back with a leather thong.

“I’ll teach you how to play it, shall I?”

The boy looked up, excitement brightening his eyes. “Will I be as good as papa?”

The older fey’s smile faltered for a second, before he recovered and mussed the fair hair. “Perhaps. Although very few were as good as your sire, boy.”

I tried to pull away, to free myself from this, whatever this was. It felt like an imprint, except that it was crystal clear, like the fey version that the telepath had shown me. But I wasn’t touching anything but leaves, so I didn’t know what was happening.

Just that I needed to get out.

But the only reward for my struggles was that the view skewed, showing me a scarred wooden cutting board and an old woman’s hands. She was setting down a bone-handled knife and sweeping some vegetable tops into a wooden pail. Which she then picked up and headed out of the cottage door, carrying me along with her.

The cold was beyond bracing, causing us to pull our shawl closer around our shoulders and to view the quiet valley in front of us through a haze of our own breath. There was a cluster of gray, stacked stone cottages, like the one we’d just left; there was a dirt road, potholed with ice-covered puddles; and there were hills covered in fir trees, the branches of which hung heavily with snow. There were also some outbuildings down a small hill, and we headed toward one of those.