“We’ve got a problem,” she says.

Jack and I stand up.

“What kind of a problem?” Jacks asks.

His voice is mild, but he’s not fooling anybody. He’s alert and ready for trouble now, just as I am.

Tatiana glances at her guard.

“Maybe I should just let Corin tell you,” she says.

Jilly

It’s harder than I expect to tell my story, mostly because of the doonie’s reaction to what I have to say. He stares at me in disbelief as I talk about my brother and the priest and all—experiences that are all too common in the world Lizzie and I come from.

“Humans really do such things to their own children?” Timony asks, unable to hide revulsion.

And I haven’t even gone into any real detail.

“That and worse,” I say.

“I can’t imagine it. Not even trolls or Redcaps would treat their own in such a way.”

What a great world it would be, to live where the kinds of things that happened to me are impossible to contemplate.

“Welcome to the real world,” Lizzie says. Then she turns to me and adds, “I knew you had a rough time growing up, but I had no idea it was anything like this.”

“It’s not important—” I start, but Lizzie cuts me off.

“How can you say that?”

“I just mean I’m not telling you about it to make anyone feel sorry for me. But you had to know the background because it’s the reason we’re here. Or at least, it’s the reason this place is here, that it exists.”

I go on to tell them about Mattie and her teddy bear that can turn into a giant version of the real thing, about the house two fields away and how I came to realize what this world is.

“I’m not so sure I like magic,” Lizzie says. “All it seems to bring is grief.”

I shake my head. “Oh, no. This isn’t the fault of magic. It’s us. People. And what we bring to it. Magic . . . the otherworld . . . it all exists as we shape it. And I guess if you’ve got a lot of baggage, it gets messy like this.”

“So we created the bogans that killed that poor deer girl and have been making my life so miserable?”

“No, there’s good and bad in the otherworld, same as in ours. And while the bad’s pretty extreme, so’s the good.”