She was a little thrown by his obvious delight in what had happened to him.

“You don’t understand,” he said. “You’re human. You know you have a soul. They’ve always told us that we don’t have souls, but still that blind man took something out of me that can’t be measured or held, and you called it back into this body of mine. If that’s not a soul, then what is?”

Lizzie didn’t know what to say. “I guess . . .”

“So what made you think it was bogans that attacked me?” he asked.

“I don’t know. Because they brought me here and that seems to be what they do. Hurt people, I mean.”

She went on to tell him a little about what had happened to her over the past few days: the death of Walker’s daughter, Siobhan being pushed down the stairs by invisible bogans, being kidnapped from her bed, killing the bogan before it could attack her again in the glade by the standing stone, and how the other one had fled.

The whole time she spoke, she couldn’t get rid of the weird, dislocating sensation of talking to someone who’d just come back from the dead. The fact that he was a little fairy man—the size of a child, but with the brown wrinkled face of an old man—didn’t feel close to unusual, not compared to that one fact.

“They shouldn’t be able to come here,” the little man said. “Not them, nor the blind man. This is a private place, my private place that I made here for myself in the Aisling’s Wood.”

“What do you mean?”

“I’m a doonie,” he told her, as though that explained everything. “Timony Twotot is what folk call me, at your service. I was freed from mine, and this is where I chose to . . .” He thought for a moment, then settled on, “This is the place I made to live out my days.”

“All alone?”

He shrugged. “I spent a lifetime with people, working for them, being around their noise and bustle. I like my solitude. And I can always go visiting if I want.”

“But there’s a barrier of thorns . . .”

He grinned. “And spells, too, to keep my stane secret and safe.” But his humour fled. “Except it’s not so safe anymore, is it?”

“What’s a stane?”

“How could you miss it? It guards the glade for me. Without it, the forest would reclaim the land I cleared. The Aisling’s Wood is riddled with hidey-holes like my own, each protected and kept hidden by its own charms and spells like the ones in my stane.”

He meant the tall standing stone where she’d killed the bogan, Lizzie realized.

“Is it broken?” she asked.