“Child of Summer? You honor me. Would that I were so young.” She smiled coyly at him. Deglan tried to keep the surprise from his face. She saw Spring, then. An Age before his own birth. “The dwarf is nothing to me,” Rosheen continued lightly. “But the ill-favored mortal youth is my friend and where he goes…,” she motioned to herself and the surrounding air.

Deglan grunted at that and turned back to the night, took another drink.

“Why did you stay?”

Deglan wanted to scream. The endless questions! He spun on his heel. “What?”

“I was just wondering why you stayed,” she pressed on innocently. “The fomori, I imagine, stayed to protect the village even though there were no more Fae-folk. Honor-bound to some oath…fomori are funny that way. But why you? Was it the humans? They do get sick quite often. And hurt. Did you stay to help them? Deliver their children? Soothe their fevers? Close their wounds? Protect them from Unwound?”

And there it was. Thrown out carelessly and casually into the night, like the rind from a fruit. He found himself standing, looking at her, saying nothing and she stared back. Not accusing, not victorious. Simply knowing.

“You saw one?” she asked gently.

Deglan looked to the ground and shook his head. “I thought I did.”

“I have been around these people most of the night. They think you had their families flee because of a murdering husk.”

“They came up with that on their own!” Deglan was growing angry, the tension of the past weeks piling in on him. “I had a mind to tell them it was the flux or plague, but when the husk turned up missing it was on everyone’s lips. But I couldn’t worry about that, I had to get them out of here! For all I know the husk did kill Brogan. There is no reason to suspect otherwise! But telling them one of those…those things was on its way here to slaughter them all would have been madness. They don’t know what an Unwound is…”

“They’ve heard…,” Rosheen cut in.

“Stories!” Deglan rode right over her. “Legends! So far away from their ken as to be nothing but crouching fable. They’ve fought barghests and ballybogs, wielded iron against them and emerged alive and victorious. They fear them, but they fight. And they would have tried to fight this! And for what? To die? To watch everything die? What good is an iron sword or sickle against an Unwound? Against living iron? The only man who would have listened to me was floating dead amongst the eels. So I let them believe what they wanted and had them flee, for all the good it did. They are all back now, every last child. All in danger.”

“Have you seen it since?”

Deglan shook his head wearily. “No. And feel grateful for it.”