“No,” he said. “Anwatan spoke the truth. We let ourselves be blinded. But now we do see through the lie. All that weighs on you is your ambition. Our deaths . . . hers . . . they were only something you planned to use to reach your goal.”

One by one the spirits of the buffalo dead faded away until finally there was only the army of the living left. The ghost buffalo went silently, their drums silent, their hooves insubstantial and raising no dust with their passing. The few dozen buffalo soldiers that remained also turned their backs on their war chief, stepping away, out of the between.

When the last of them were gone, there was only Minisino standing on the plain. Minisino facing the handful of cousins and humans who’d had the courage to stand between his army and the fairy courts.

“Why did you do this to me?” he asked Christiana.

“I didn’t do it to you,” she said. “You did it to yourself. Truth is, I make it a rule never to get involved in this kind of crap, but I need a favour from Tatiana and stopping you’s the only way I’m going to get it.”

“You could have asked me for help.”

“Yeah, right.”

She turned to look at the others.

“That was well done,” Raven said.

She shook her head. “You heard me. I wasn’t doing this to help anybody but my brother. Now Tatiana has to find him for me.”

“Who is your brother?” Walker asked.

“Nobody you’d know. Just another human who got caught up in your fun and games.”

She tipped a finger against her brow and just like that, she was gone again, stepping away as suddenly as she’d come.

Jilly

Lizzie and Honey work at getting me up on my feet—Lizzie physically trying to pull me up, Honey whispering encouragement in my mind—but I can’t rise. I can’t do anything. All I can do is relive that moment when I dropped the pail and so threw away any chance of getting Geordie back.

We can’t stay here, Honey is saying. We need to get out of the sun. And we need to find Joe. He’ll know what to do.

Not even Joe’s going to have an answer for this one. How do I reclaim all the dirt and debris that spilled out of the pail and went scattering down onto the rocks below? If I’ve doomed Geordie, I’ll be damned if I’ll do anything to help myself. I deserve to just die here. I should stay here until that burning sun overhead turns me into dust and the wind blows all the little bits of me away.

Let me be Dust Girl.

“You go on,” I say. “Just leave me here. I need to stay here.”

We can’t do that, Lizzie says. We won’t.