As the caravan rolled into our sleepy little town, a crowd started to gather. Nestled between a faerie forest and the Harrow River, Rurava wasn’t exactly a destination for out-of-towners. There was the occasional traveling merchant or adventurer on their way to something better, but even the most mundane visitor was cause for excitement and speculation—and this wagon was anything but mundane.

It passed the orchards, the apiary, the blacksmith’s forge, and stopped under the ancient oak in the middle of the main square without any regard for the regular daily activities going on there. Tall, golden grass shivered under its wheels, and sunlight dappled its shiny sides.

“Let’s go see,” Isolde begged, tugging me by the hand. We were fourteen and thought we knew everything.

As my twin and I stood near the outer fringe of the group, where I wouldn’t feel too pressed in, a man stepped out onto the little stage with so much force that I wondered if he’d kicked the door down. He looked maybe my parents’ age, with neatly parted mousy-brown hair down to his shoulders and a gleam in his eye I couldn’t read at all.

“Good afternoon, folks! I am Cassius Redbrook, and I am here with solutions to all your problems! Unless it’s problems with love, in which case you’re on your own.”

He was warming up the crowd before they even had a chance to question him. A few people chuckled faintly. Isolde rolled her eyes like only a fourteen-year-old can.

And then he quickly launched into his sales pitch for various kinds of garbage—for hair loss, hair removal, coughs, headaches—

“You name it!”

He dazzled the crowd with a too-white smile and tossed out samples and big, brash promises, and then he reeled them in with what made him unique: the fae prevention and repellant measures.

What a joke. Faerie mischief is just a part of life. Anyone with common sense accepts this and does their best to coexist, with bribes of milk and shiny things. Keep your head down and don’t bargain with them, and you’ll mostly be left alone.

People with common sense are rare.

Everyone knows someone who knows someone—someone who was unlucky enough to cross the faeries and woke up the next day dead...if they were lucky.

Some woke with flowers sprouting under their skin, vines curling around muscles that made every movement more and more painful until they eventually choked to death on the leaves filling their lungs. Others lost their sense of taste, their memories, their most-beloved skill. There were stories of people who cried pure, crystalline salt, whose raw faces and unseeing eyes bore the scars of thousands of tiny scratches. I’d even heard of some who could never feel warm, no matter how many layers they wrapped themselves in, who burned themselves alive just to relieve the cold.

Most of these stories were probably not true—but why take the risk?

Redbrook’s so-called fae prevention was even worse than the rest of his stuff: special herbed salts to ward off brownies, potions to drink to safely cross the forest at night, dust to throw at a faerie if it approached you. And then it got worse.