The pull in the middle of her stomach is steady and no longer as intense as it was before she started walking. Her feet seem to know where to go, so she lets them carry her away. Who is this princess the Hag mentioned? Could she be Croi’s mother? The word “mother,” however, is too strange. Her tongue curls around the unfamiliar syllables; the expected sweetness is missing.

Why would a mother put a Glamour on her own child? Cast a summoning spell? Croi hasn’t met any kin mothers, so she’s not sure, but human mothers don’t seem to hurt their children as a rule. Croi dismisses the idea. The princess the Hag mentioned cannot possibly be her mother. Surely no mother would be that cruel to her child.

She sucks in a breath and thinks of the stone maid. Will the stone maid think she has been abandoned? Will the stone maid hate her? Croi rubs her eyes when they sting. Her steps are slow and her feet drag, but the summoning spell pulls her forward regardless.

As she walks deeper into the forest, she thinks about the kin she might meet on her journey. All she knows about them is what she has learned from the books. How should she talk to them? What if she says the wrong thing and angers them? Croi has learned the correct etiquette, but theory is different from practice. Angry faces don’t bother her much, but what if their anger moves their hands and they try to hurt her?

When the light in the forest dims and a chill finds its way under her dress, Croi comes across a hollow in a wide-trunked tree and examines it curiously. She has always had an amicable relationship with trees. Perhaps it’s because she is—no, she was—the Hag’s own, but she has always felt warmth emanating from them. Now that she has left the Hag—no, now that she has been thrown away by the Hag—they have become alien to her. But she has no other place to go, and she’d much rather be in the hollow than on the ground, so she shrugs and crawls in. It’s a snug fit, and she has to curl up tight, but she is safe and warm. Exhaustion slides its gnarly fingers up her body. She hurts all over, but it is the uncertainty about who she is, what she is, that makes her shiver. She tries to curl up into as small a not-brownie as she can. Fear is an unfamiliar emotion. It resides in her chest, and when she pokes at it, it bites her insides.

She is not a brownie. But if not a brownie, what is she? Not a human. The Hag would never keep her around if she were one. Perhaps she is a sylph or maybe a goblin. A centaur? Croi doesn’t fancy being part horse, though. She would like to be a pixie, but they’re tiny, so she’d be shrinking instead of growing taller.