“Good night, your Majesty,” one of the guards mocked.

“Come visit again soon,” said another.

They walked away laughing. “Next time we’ll have his ears,” one said.

Ben lay upon the ground momentarily, head spinning. Slowly he pushed himself upright and looked back across the bridge at the castle lights. He stared at the towers and battlements as they glistened silver in the light of Land over’s eight moons and listened to the fading sound of voices and the heavy thud of the gates being closed.

Then all was silent.

He still could not believe that this was happening to him.

Mother!” Willow whispered, and there was excitement and longing in her voice.

Moonlight draped the great forests of the lake country in a mix of rainbow colors, its cool brightness a beacon against the shadows. Parsnip was encamped somewhere far back within those shadows, patiently awaiting her return. Elderew lay distant, the city of the River Master wrapped in silence, her inhabitants asleep. Elderew was Willow’s home and the River Master was her father, but it was neither her home nor her father that she had come to see this night.

It was the wood nymph who danced before her like a vision out of fairy.

Willow knelt at the edge of a clearing surrounded by aging pines and watched the magic unfold. Her mother spun and leaped through the night’s stillness, light and ephemeral, born of air and blown on the wind. She was a tiny thing, little more than a wisp of life. White gauze clothed her, transparent and weightless, and the pale green skin of her child’s body glimmered beneath the covering. Waist-length silver hair rippled and shimmered with each movement she made, a trailer of white fire against the night’s dark. Music that she alone could hear swept her on.

Willow watched in rapture. Her mother was a wild thing, so wild that she could not live among humans, even the once-fairy people of the lake country. She had bonded briefly to Willow’s father, but that had been long ago. They had bonded once only, her father nearly driven mad with need for the wood nymph he could not have, and then her mother had disappeared back into the forests again. She had never come back. Willow had been born of that brief union, her father’s constant reminder of the fairy being he forever wanted and could never have. His impossible longing aroused in him both love and hate. His feelings for Willow had always been ambivalent.

Willow understood. She was a sylph, an elemental. She was the child of both her parents, her constant water sprite father and her mercurial wood nymph mother. Her father’s domesticity gave her stability, but she was imbued with her mother’s wildness as well. She was a creature of contradictions. Amorphous, she was both flesh and plant. She was human in the greater part of the moon’s cycle and plant briefly in the cycle’s apex—a single night each twenty-day. Ben had been shocked to see her transformation that first night. She had changed from human to tree in this very clearing, feeding on the energy implanted by her mother in the earth where she danced. Ben had been shocked, but she was what she was, and he had come to accept that. One day he would even love her for it, she believed. It was not so with her father. His love was conditional and always would be. He was still a captive of the insatiable need her mother aroused in him. Willow only seemed to emphasize the weight of the chains that bound him.