“I can’t explain it,” the little man said. “Even by the capricious laws that govern the otherworld, I wouldn’t have believed that such a place could exist, because we all carry the blessing of the Grace inside us—even those of us with the darkest hearts. And your friend Jilly carries a bright reflection of the Grace’s light. But still, given that bounty of light, this place exists inside her. I think because she believes it does.”

“She’s inside her own mind?”

He nodded. “The three of us were trapped in there until I was pushed out by one her phantoms. And before you ask, I can’t get back in.”

I hardly heard the last thing he said. I was too busy trying to work through the concept of being physically trapped in your own mind.

“Is that even possible?” I found myself asking. “Being physically trapped in your own mind?”

Just because it was nothing I’d ever heard of before didn’t mean it couldn’t be true. I knew next to nothing about magic, even after having hung around in a fairy court for a couple of years. I’d just played music there. I’d never gotten into the philosophies of magic. But still. You’d think something this odd would have come up in conversation before—with my brother, with somebody.

“Somewhere,” the little man told me, “anything is possible.”

“Why is that not comforting.”

“And less so for those I was forced to leave behind. Your friends are in a terrible place. The things Jilly told us about her childhood . . .”

I nodded slowly. “Yeah, she really had it rough.”

The little man gave me a shocked look.

“You knew?” he said. “You knew and you did nothing?”

“Hey, I was just a kid myself at the time, and I hadn’t even met her yet. We didn’t meet until we were in our twenties, and all that crap was behind her.” I hesitate a moment, then add, “Well, it seemed to be behind her. You had to know her to understand that it was always going to be an issue.”

“I don’t understand you people—how you can let such things be.”

“I don’t understand why we treat each other the way we do either, but right now I don’t much care. I’m more concerned about how we can get to wherever it is that you left Jilly and Lizzie.”

“There is no way back to them,” the little man said.

But I could hear Jilly’s voice in my head, repeating something I’d heard her say a thousand times . . . to me, to herself, to anyone who came up against the wall of “I couldn’t ever do that”:

“There’s no such thing as impossible; there’s only not trying.”

I repeated it now to the little man.