“Then maybe we should concentrate on what we can do and try to find Joe.”

The doonie nodded. I didn’t see what he did next, but the view into the between disappeared, and we were back on that lonely grey shore once more. After what we’d just experienced, this place seemed even more desolate and lost, reflecting my mood. I tried not to get absorbed by the feeling it woke inside me.

“So, how do we start?” I asked.

“Concentrate on your friend,” Timony told me. “If you can bring up a strong enough essence of him in your mind, I should be able to use that to start my own search.”

Fairy magic’s mostly about will—I’d learned that from Galfreya. Oh, there are spells and magical talismans and all the usual baggage you hear about with magic, but the clarity of your vision and the strength of your will are what underlies everything.

Well and good in theory, but it wasn’t anything I’d ever put into practice.

Have you ever noticed how when you don’t want to think about something, you can’t get it out of your mind? Conversely, when you’re trying to concentrate, holding a particular person or place in your head seems impossible. No matter how well you think you know them, the familiar keeps sliding away and all you’re left with are ghost traces of these things you thought you knew so well.

It was like that when I tried to envision Joe. He was the kind of guy who made a serious impression on you—those crazy eyes, for starters—but I couldn’t seem to hold onto an image of him. So I tried thinking about the times I’d been around him, which were usually in Jilly’s company, and that made me think of Jilly instead. I had no trouble calling up an image of her. She’s hardwired into my head and has been pretty much from the day we first met, working as part-timers for the post office that Christmas so long ago.

It’s funny. I was in my early twenties at the time, but it feels like I’ve known her all my life. Sometimes when we’re talking, I’ll bring up things from when I was a teenager—swimming at the sand pits, being chased by that bull on the old Haile Farm, playing fiddle tunes on a granite outcrop out behind my parents’ house—and I’m surprised when she doesn’t remember them. She’ll give me a look and then I realize, well, of course she wouldn’t. We didn’t even know each other back then. But it sure feels like we did. Or that we should have. And I don’t have to try very hard to be able to picture her there, even when I know she wasn’t.