Invisibility is supposed to be Croi’s magick, and her magick is not supposed to fail. But fail it does. People look in Croi’s direction and they see her.

They see her.

A short, plump creature with long, straight brown hair, wearing a baggy dress that looks like the bark of a tree (only because it is) and scarves the color of dusk wrapped around her neck. They see a brownie with eyes the brown of a chocolate pudding. A brownie with a round face, a button nose, large pointed ears, sharp teeth, and brown skin. They see someone who is very obviously not human like them.

Nobody moves, nobody speaks, and for a second nobody even breathes. Then hysteria conquers the masses. Someone screams and someone else swoons. Croi stands, fixed in place, too surprised to move. The princeling is calling for guards. Croi can hear them running around the corner; she knows they have their shiny sharp swords at the ready.

She takes a breath of the suddenly suffocating air and squeezes her eyes shut.

TWO

ONE SECOND PASSES, TAUT WITH the possibility of death. Then the air crackles one more time, and Croi is able to breathe again. Her magick has reasserted itself.

Bewilderment shades the expressions of the humans. They blink and rub their eyes, distrusting their minds. Croi is invisible to humans again. Whispers crowd the tense air when the soldiers point their swords and find that there’s nothing to poke.

Croi slips away from the crowd, barely suppressing the urge to run. What if she bumps into someone else? Brownies are supposed to be unfailingly invisible to humans! Why did that change? How? Humans don’t truly believe in kin except as figments of their fancies. This disbelief strengthens their inability to fathom kin.

But they saw her! She saw herself reflected in their eyes! Croi doesn’t know the hows or the whys of it, but she rarely does about anything, so she’s not very bothered. What thrills her is the fact that for the very first time in her (almost) seventeen years of life, someone other than the Hag saw her. Of course, their reaction after seeing her leaves something to be desired, but that’s unimportant. What matters is that, just for a moment, she existed fully in the human world.

Suddenly Croi remembers the stone maid and hastens her steps. She slips behind the rosebush, wiggles through the hole in the castle walls, and enters the leafy embrace of the Wilde Forest. Sharp relief hits her and she takes a deep breath, drinking in the smell of the forest. Just as she is beginning to calm, a sudden pain stabs in her chest, and she falls to her knees, her palms flat on the ground.

The forest throbs underneath her hands. The pain fades after a moment, but Croi doesn’t remove her hands from the ground. She’s too busy feeling the forest breathe. It is alive in a different way than the human city. Where the city is animated due to the people living in it, the forest owes its life not to the beings that call it home but to something deeper, something wilder, something Croi doesn’t yet have the words for.