I couldn’t make my fingers reach out and touch the thing. Coward. Useless apology for a woman. I got up and paced, arms folded tightly. Four strides across the room one way; four strides back. Ground my teeth until my jaw hurt. Resisted the urge to pick something up and throw it, just to hear it smash. Ordered myself to breathe. I would be calm before Grim got back. I would.

“All right?” He was at the door, full bucket in hand. “What do you think? Like writing, isn’t it? A message.” He set down the bucket and reached into his pouch again. “Funny. When I got that out, I found this. Under that stuff they gave us to block our ears. Not from Geiléis, though, or anyone here. Can’t be. Look at it.”

He laid the tiny item on the table beside the stone. It was a whistle like the ones the traveling folk played, only in miniature. The instrument was carved from oak and elaborately decorated with a design of leaves and tendrils and tight-furled, delicate flowers.

“You mean you don’t know where this came from?” I asked.

“No idea. But I can guess. Did those wee folk a favor, didn’t I? Thought they’d paid me back by finding my way for me. Thought our exchange was all done. But it looks as if they left me a gift.”

I wasn’t going to argue with that. The whistle was so small and so finely made that the most doubting of folk would surely have conceded it must be fey. “Be careful,” I said. “Blow a tune on that and you might summon something you don’t want hanging about.”

Grim stowed the whistle back in his pouch. “Or find myself in some other land, where monsters are as common as squirrels, and all the folk walk on their hands.”

“You’d do all right there,” I said. The urge to hurl heavy objects around was abating. “Listen, don’t blow the whistle. I mean it. If the old stories are right, you should use it only as a last resort. And . . .”

“Maybe you should take it.” Grim had his back to me; he was ladling water from his bucket to the kettle.

“Me? Hardly.” If I obeyed my heart and went south with Flannan, Grim was going to need whatever help came his way. “If they gave it to you, you’re the one who’s meant to use it.”

“It’s just, I wouldn’t know what was the right time. Might make a mess of things.”

“You’ll know. When everything else fails. When you have no other solution.”

“Like when you ran away and I had to shout for Conmael.” He set the kettle on the fire, then began to look for herbs.

There was nothing I could say. I imagined myself leaving with Flannan, fleeing into the night while this household slept. I imagined Grim waking in the dark, finding me gone, blowing his magic whistle to summon fey help. My mind refused to go any further. For the life of me, I could not conjure an image of Flannan and myself apprehended by an army of clurichauns. “The thing to remember,” I said, working hard on a calm tone, “is not to use it unless you really have to. These things always come with a catch. If the fey help you, they always want something in return.” Like Conmael, who had saved my life only after I’d promised to abide by his ridiculous conditions for a whole seven years. It had never been realistic. That I’d even tried had been stupid. I simply wasn’t cut out to do good in the world, no matter what Conmael believed.