“Onchú?” I ventured.

“Yes, Mistress Blackthorn? Careful, don’t slip.” He reached out a hand to steady me as I came down a bank.

“Have you ever seen fey folk in these woods? Small ones, about this high?”

“Why do you ask?”

“I spotted something in the distance.” I wasn’t going to talk about what had just happened. I would tell Grim, of course, but nobody else. If the small fey folk were afraid of Geiléis’s guards, I’d best not reveal the fact that I had just met one of them. If the little woman was sworn to silence, at least where talking to me was concerned, I’d best not make it known that she had communicated in another way, a way known only to druids and wise women. It was hard to believe Geiléis’s household did not know of their existence already. Surely everyone in the district must know. Why had nobody mentioned them? “It looked like a very small person in a cloak, running through the woods. But I might have been wrong; it could have been a—a squirrel. Or a bird.”

“The woods play tricks,” Onchú said. “They make folk see things that aren’t there. Or turn things into what they’re not. That’s why you shouldn’t come out on your own. Especially when you’re not used to the place.”

“How can you know if what you see is real or not?”

For the first time, Geiléis’s head guard looked uncomfortable. “Father Tomas would say such manifestations are the work of the devil, and should be shunned.”

“But what would you say?”

We had walked some considerable distance back toward the house before he replied. “Too many good people have wandered from the path in pursuit of strange visions, and have come to grief as a result of it. I do not believe it matters what they are, real or false, human, animal or fey. A person should turn his gaze away and walk on by. Unless he cares nothing for his survival.”

“You’ve known people who saw and followed these small fey folk, and were lost or hurt?”

“I cannot say what they saw, Mistress Blackthorn. Only they could do that, and of those I know, two are dead and the other out of his wits. We found him floundering in the shallows of the river one winter morning, close to the shore but unable to take those few steps required to reach the safety of the bank. A local lad, a swineherd who had taken his animals to forage for acorns in the wood. Almost dead from cold, and completely mad. He could not tell us what had happened.”

This alarming tale was consistent with what Geiléis had told us about the curse. “But,” I said, “that story might have nothing to do with the fey, real or imagined. The swineherd might simply have slipped and fallen into the river.” But, of course, that was not the whole story. The cold does not drive people mad. And if he had fallen in by accident, why hadn’t he simply waded to the bank? “Was the man injured? Did he suffer physical damage? Where is he now?”