Read Chapter 7: Glints in the Forest

The glen lay hidden in a fold of the Court that Maeve had never seen—a place where the pale gold light of Autumn filtered through trees that bore fruit and flame-colored leaves at once. Ciarán stood at its center, arms crossed, looking less like a silver-tongued courtier and more like a man about to teach a child to swim in deep water.

"You've seen the doorways," he said. "Between your world and ours. You've walked through them, but you've never *seen* them."

Maeve shifted on her feet. The whistle was hidden in her boot, cold against her ankle, and the queen's summons still rang in her ears. She had only minutes before the hand would come looking for her. "I don't have time for riddles."

"You don't have time *not* to learn this." Ciarán beckoned her closer. "The Seelie queen will ask you questions. Some you can answer with lies. Some require truth. But if you can see the paths—the *other* paths, the ones that run beside the ones everyone walks—you might find an answer to a question she never thought to ask."

He held out his hand. She took it reluctantly.

"Look at the tree line," he said. "Not the trees. The spaces between them. Let your eyes go soft. Like you're reading a page of a book in a language you don't know, but you're trying to remember it anyway."

Maeve tried. The glen swam slightly, the edges of things blurring. She frowned.

"Again," Ciarán said. "Slower. Your heart is racing. The mortal part of you is loud. Quiet it."

She breathed. The scent of woodsmoke and fallen apples filled her lungs. She thought of the pub, of the fire in the hearth, of Declan's laugh—

The spaces between the trees shimmered.

It was subtle, like heat rising off summer pavement. But beneath the shimmer, she caught a thread of silver light, no thicker than a strand of spider silk, running from the base of an oak to a point somewhere beyond the glen.

"There," she said, breath catching.

"Good." Ciarán's grip tightened. "Now follow the thread. Let it pull your gaze to where it ends."

The silver line trembled, and then the world *folded*, the way a river folds around a stone. She was looking through the space between trees—but not at the Court of Autumn anymore.

She saw her family's pub.

The kitchen, to be precise. The same worn counter where she'd sliced bread a thousand times. The same pot hanging over the fire. And there—

Declan.

He was older. Not the boy of twelve she'd left behind, but a young man of sixteen or seventeen, gangly and broad-shouldered, with their father's dark hair falling across his eyes. He was laughing at something—her mother, perhaps, though Maeve couldn't see her from this angle. He was healthy. He was whole. The hollow look he'd worn in the months before she'd made her bargain was gone, replaced by a grin that made her chest ache.

"How long?" she whispered. "How long has it been for them?"

"Time here moves differently," Ciarán said quietly. "You know this. A month in the Court can be a year in the mortal world. Or the reverse. It depends on the season, on the queen's whims, on the phase of the moon and the mood of the sea. No one can predict it."

"I've been here less than an eight-night."

"By your count. By theirs—" He gestured at the vision. "Six years, perhaps. Maybe more."

The kitchen wavered. Declan was standing now, reaching for something on a high shelf. His hands were bigger. His shoulders broader. HIs voice, when he called out to their mother, was deeper.

Maeve felt something crack inside her chest.

"Six years," she repeated. "He's grown up without me. He won't even remember what I look like."

"He remembers," Ciarán said. "I can see it in the way he looks at the door. He's waiting for you. He does that—every evening, from the look of it."

The vision sharpened. Declan glanced at the pub door, and in that glance Maeve saw it—the grief, worn smooth with time but still there, still waiting. Her little brother. Her Declan. Looking at a door she hadn't walked through in six years.

"Let me speak to him," she said, the words tearing out of her. "Please. Ciarán, *please*. Just—"

She reached for her boot. For the whistle. The silver was warm against her fingers, humming with that strange resonance she'd felt since the first night, and if she could just blow it, just once—

Ciarán's hand closed over her wrist. "No."

"He's my brother. I have to—"

"You have to *think*." His voice was sharp, cutting through the fog of her desperation. "What did the whistle show you? What did the words say?"

Maeve's hand trembled on the whistle. *When breath runs out, the truth will surface.* She didn't know what that meant. But she knew, with a certainty that chilled her more than the Court's autumn air, that the whistle was not a toy. It was a key. A key she might only get to use once.

"If you waste it now," Ciarán said, "you'll have nothing when you truly need it. And you will need it Maeve. The queen doesn't summon people to her throne to offer them tea."

The vision in the glen was fading. Declan was fading. Her brother, her *family*, slipping away like smoke.

She couldn't. She couldn't just let him go.

Maeve's fingers tightened on the whistle. She tried to pull it free.

Ciarán's hand clamped down harder. "The queen is waiting. If you're not there when the hand arrives—"

"Then maybe I shouldn't be there at all." She yanked her wrist free, staggered back a step. The whistle was halfway out of her boot, the silver gleaming in the strange light. "Maybe I should just—"

She stopped.

Declan was gone. The vision of the pub had collapsed into nothing, leaving only the glen and the trees and the spaces between them. But beneath the whistle's touch, Maeve felt something else. A pulse. A heartbeat, almost. Something buried deep in the earth, connected to the silver in her hand.

No. Not connected.

*Warning.*

The whistle wasn't telling her to blow it now. It was telling her not to. Not yet. Not until she understood what she was truly holding.

"What are you?" she whispered.

"It's not what I am," Ciarán said quietly. "It's what you are. What you always were, even before the contract. The whistle is a tool, Maeve. It can only do what its wielder can survive."

She stared at it. At the etched words she'd memorized in the dark of her small room. At the humming, patient silver that had chosen her—or been given to her—for a reason she couldn't yet fathom.

Slowly, she tucked it back into her boot.

Ciarán exhaled. Whether in relief or something else, she couldn't tell.

"You made the right choice," he said.

"Did I?" Maeve looked toward the path that led back to the Court proper, where the queen's hand would be waiting. "My brother has been without me for six years because of a deal I made to save him. And I just chose a whistle over the chance to speak to him. Tell me, Ciarán—does that sound like a woman making the right choices?"

He said nothing.

Maeve straightened her shoulders. She tightened the laces of her dress, wiped the tears from her cheeks, and made her way back toward the Court of Autumn and the queen who owned her name.

Behind her, Ciarán spoke one last time. "The paths between worlds don't just show you what you've lost, Maeve. They show you what could be. What might still be, if you find the right door."

She didn't turn around.

But she felt the words settle into her chest, heavy as stones.

And she remembered—couldn't stop remembering—the way Declan had looked at that door.

Waiting for her.

Still waiting.