“Where are you now?” he asks instead.

“Oh! I’m in the Otherworld!” Croi tells him about the empty village and the beast in the mountain. About the pixie meadow and the catkin. When mentioning Caolan, she gets serious. “Don’t get offended, all right? But the catkin said your mom is having her minions kidnap young kin from all over Talamh. Is that true?”

It is a gloomy afternoon in Croi’s dream, and the wan light creates hollows and shadows on Irial’s face. Her words evoke little emotion in the fae boy, and for a moment, Croi thinks her words have angered him.

He says something, but his voice is too low for Croi to comprehend his words.

“What did you say?”

“I said I don’t know!” he bursts out. “I wish I could say no and get angry at the accusation, but now it feels like I don’t even know her or what she’s capable of. What reason could there be for her to kidnap kin? Young kin? If you say she wants them for an army, she already has soldiers at her command. To help her take over the Caisleán? She’s already the queen and one without any threats to her power. But this is all I know. She might be doing something I don’t.”

“What you’re saying is that she could be behind these kidnappings, but she probably isn’t?” Croi says out loud, her voice a dragon-roar. She winces. “Sorry.”

“Yeah,” Irial says, and suddenly sits down on the cliff. Croi, in an attempt to comfort him, covers him with a wing. He gives her a bemused look before his face lightens with a smile. “Thank you.”

“I think I am a Tine kin,” Croi confides to Irial. He is warm by her side. “I can hear the fire song.”

“But weren’t you a tree—”

“We decided we’d never talk about my tree phase again. Remember?” Croi growls.

“You decided. I never mentioned a thing,” Irial mutters. “How far are you from the Caisleán?”

“I’m not sure. I’m waiting for the pixie to find me. I asked her to lead me there,” Croi says to him.

Irial says something in response, but his words are drowned out by the scream in her mind. It’s her other self.

WAKE UP!!!

The command is sudden and the dream breaks immediately. Croi’s eyes open to an abrasive darkness that even her changed eyes cannot pierce.

“What is it?”

Look.

Spherical globes of ghostly blue suddenly push the darkness back, and Croi sits up, her chest hurting. Will-o’-wisps. If she remembers correctly, will-o’-wisps augur danger, doom, and sometimes death. Belatedly, she notices what they’re illuminating.

The tree branches that blot out the sky are laden with night crows. They were the darkness that pressed against her eyes. With their sooty feathers and red eyes, night crows are a prelude to nightmares. They sit with unnatural stillness, looking down at Croi. The Hag said that night crows are portents of death. Are the will-o’-wisps present because of the night crows, or are the night crows present because of the will-o’-wisps? This is a puzzle Croi has no interest in unraveling. What she is sure of is that something is either already wrong or about to go wrong.