And then the cerva was here, and no one wanted or needed to speak. Not even me, and I was supposed to be our spokesperson.

It’s funny. I thought I’d be fine, that my time in Galfreya’s fairy court, that knowing Joe and some of the other cousins, would have prepared me for this. But Walker was different from any of them. Fairies, depending on their affiliations, were by turns whimsical, grotesque, heartbreakingly beautiful, or stern. Joe and his cousins were mostly earthy and scruffy . . . and just a little scary. Or at least the ones I’d met were—barring the crow girls.

But Walker . . . Walker was tall and composed in demeanor, an inspiring figure with the long face of a deer, a massive rack of antlers and deep brown eyes that were like dark pools hiding all the forest’s secrets in their depths. Looking at him, I started thinking about all those murmurs and hints of the Horned Lord of the Hunt that sometimes come twisting through the ballads and tunes that make up my repertoire. If Walker’s presence was anything like what Cernunnos was supposed to be like, it didn’t surprise me that he’d been so revered back in the old countries—you know, before the priests in their robes made worshipping him yet another sin.

Standing here in his presence, I understood the reverence people had felt for that European lord of the forest. Here, in our own woods, I wanted to go down on my knees in front of Walker and ask for a blessing.

But that wasn’t going to happen. Not so much because I couldn’t find the voice to ask, but because I realized those calm eyes of his also held dark fires in their depths. There was a set to his jaw and shoulders that told me he was nowhere near pleased to meet with us here.

“I don’t know you,” he said, his voice deep and resonant, “and you have the stink of fairy on you. Why did you summon me, and who gave you my name?”

A threat lay heavy in the air, carried on the shoulders of his words. Not the threat of violence. For all that he was so tall and broad-chested, I didn’t get the impression that he dealt with his problems in a might-makes-right kind of way. The threat I sensed was subtler than that. A promise that he could close doors inside us that were open at the moment. And the doors he could close were . . .

I don’t know what the others were getting from him, but for me I understood that the door he could close was on my music and my connections to the fairy realms. I could live with losing magic—it always just seemed to bring complications and trouble anyway—but not my music. I couldn’t live without my music.