Lizzie and Timony both want to help, but I know I can get them to stay. Geordie’s a whole other matter. Even with what he’s just been through, that Riddell loyalty won’t let him allow me to face this by myself.

“You’re not going alone,” he says. “I won’t lose you again.”

“You don’t understand. I have to do this alone. I can’t do it if I have to worry about anyone else.”

“But he’s—”

“I know what he is. I know how powerful he can be. I just have to be stronger. I have to really believe that I’m stronger. That no matter what he does to me, it’s only real if I let it be real.”

“But I could be your Tamlin,” Geordie says. “You know, holding on to you no matter what he changes you into.”

“Except he’ll change you first.”

“Well, what about you?” Geordie asks Honey.

There’s some disagreement as to how safe it would be for me, she says. And I would argue it more, but in the end, Jilly’s right. I can’t do what needs to be done. No one can . . . except for Jilly.

“It’s true,” I say. “Everybody’s been telling me this from day one. Joe. Nokomis. The crow girls. This is the thing I’ve got to deal with before I can work on anything else.”

“I don’t like it,” Geordie says.

I have to smile. “I don’t like it either, Geordie, me lad. What’s to like about it? But it’s what has to be done.”

I look away from him across the badlands. The combination of the red rocks vibrating against the complimentary greens of the pines, with the wide blue sky above it all, does a funny thing to me. It makes me feel physically small, but big inside. I understand now why Sophie is so enamoured with this landscape—escaping to it whenever she can, not just to paint it, but to be a part of it.

The religions have it wrong. God isn’t in holy books and churches. God’s out here where the sky feels like it goes on forever.

Unfortunately, I have to go back to the close woods and the claustrophobic confines of the house I grew up in.

I turn to look at Honey and Timony.

“Can one of you send me back?” I ask.

“I could,” Timony says, “but it would send you back to what you’ve just left behind. It would be better for you to make your own way, to choose your own time and place to meet him again.”

“I can do that?”

Timony smiles. “It’s your mind.”

“But I don’t know how to go.”

“The easiest way to enter the fairy realms,” he says, “is to walk widdershins around a place or object of power. I sense one at the top of this mesa.”